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" She lifcliteil a potent pipe." See page -l-l. 



ZP/rc - 



SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 



/BY 

W. D. HOWELLS, 

AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN LIFE," "ITALIAN JOUENEYS," ETC. 

NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION. 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
AUGUSTUS HOPPIN. 




'w OF ca^i;:^ 



>iN 



/,;> COPYRIGHT V 



BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 

Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 

1872. 



Yo 



c-' 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by 

AViLLIAM D. IIOWELLS, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusette 



RIVERSIDE, CASIBRrDGB; 

BTEREOTTPED AND PRINTED BT 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



v3 

o 



^4 

i 



CONTENTS. 



PAOB. 

Mrs. Johnson 11 

Doorstep Acquaintance 35 

A Pedestrian Tour 60 

By Horse-Car to Boston 91 

A Day's Pleasure 115 

A Romance of Real Life 171 

Scene 190 

Jubilee Dats 195 

Some Lessons from the School of AIokals . . 220 

Flitting . . 241 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



SlIK LIGHllil) A roTKXT PIPE /• 

" HUT 1 SUPPOSE THIS WINE IS Nor JIADE UK (JUAPES, SIGNOU ? " 

LOOKING ABOUT, I SAW TWO WOMEN 

THE YOUNG LADY IX BLACK, WHO ALIGIITI-.U Af A Mosr ()i;i)I- 

NARY LITTLE STREET 

THAT SWEET YOUNG BLONDE, WHO AUHnES BY MOST TRAINS 
FP.ANK AND LUCY STALKED AHEAD, WITH SHAWLS DRAGGING 

FROM THEIR ARMS 

THEY SKIRMISH ABOUT HIM WITH EVERY SORT OF QUERY 
A GAUNT FIGURE OF FORLORN AND CURIOUS SSIARTNESS . 

THE SPECTACLE AS WE BEHELD IT 

VACANT AND CEREMONIOUS ZEAL 



PAGE 

'niiit. ■ 

65 

!)-2 
11!) 



154 

ir.i 

171 
199 
252 



SUBUEBAI^ SKETCHES. 



SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 



MRS. JOHNSON. 

It was on a morning of the lovely New England 
May that we left the horse-car, and, spreading our 
umbrellas, walked down the street to our new home 
in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain 
so finely blent by the influences of this fortunate 
climate, that no flake knew itself from its sister drop, 
or could be better identified by the people against 
whom they beat in unison. A vernal gale from the 
east fanned our cheeks and pierced our marrow and 
chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of the 
adventurous grass on the borders of the sopping side- 
walks gave, as it peered through its veil of melting 
snow and freezing rain, a peculiar cheerfulness to the 
landscape. Here and there in the vacant lots aban- 
doned hoop-skirts defied decay ; and near the half- 
finished wooden houses, empty mortar-beds, and bits 
of lath and slate strewn over the scarred and muti- 
lated ground, added their interest to the scene. A 
shaggy drift hung upon the trees before our own 
house (which had been built some years earlier),, 
while its swollen eaves wept silently and incessantly 



12 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

upon the embankments lifting its base several feet 
above the common level. 

This heavenly weather, which the Pilgrim Fathers, 
with the idea of turning their thoughts effectually 
from earthly pleasures, came so far to discover, con- 
tinued with slio;ht amelioration throuo-hout the month 
of May and far into June ; and it was a matter of 
constant amazement with one who had known less 
austere climates, to behold how vegetable life struff- 
gled with the hostile skies, and, in an atmosphere as 
chill and damp as that of a cellar, shot forth the buds 
and blossoms upon the pear-trees, called out the sour 
Puritan courage of the currant-bushes, taught a reck- 
less native grape-vine to wander and Avanton over 
the southern side of the fence, and decked the banks 
with violets as fearless and as fragile as New England 
girls ; so that about the end of June, when the heav- 
ens relented and the sun blazed out at last, there was 
little for him to do but to redden and darken the 
daring fruits that had attained almost their full growth 
without his countenance. 

Then, indeed, Charlesbridge appeared to us a kind 
of Paradise. The wind blew all day from the south- 
west, and all day in the grove across the way the 
orioles sang to their nestlings. The butcher's wagon 
rattled merrily up to our gate every morning ; and 
if we had kept no other reckoning, we should have 
known it was Thursday by the grocer. We were 
living in the country with the conveniences and lux- 
uries of the city about us. The house was almost 
new and in perfect repair ; and, better than all, the 



MRS. JOHNSON. 13 

kitchen had as yet given no signs of unrest in those 
volcanic agencies which are constantly at work there, 
and which, with sudden explosion, make Hercula- 
neums and Pompeiis of so many smihng households. 
Breakfast, dinner, and tea came up with illusive 
regularity, and were all the most perfect of their 
kind ; and we laughed and feasted in our vain se- 
curity. We had out from the city to banquet with 
us the friends we loved, and we were inexpressibly 
proud before them of the Help, who first wrought 
miracles of cookery in our honor, and then appeared 
in a clean white apron, and the glossiest black hair, 
to wait upon the table. She was young, and cer- 
tainly very pretty ; she was as gay as a lark, and 
was courted by a young man whose clothes would 
have been a credit, if they had not been a reproach, 
to our lowly basement. She joyfully assented to the 
idea of staying with us till she married. 

In fact, there was much that was extremely pleas- 
ant about the little place when the warm weather 
came, and it was not wonderful to us that Jenny was 
willing to remain. It was very quiet ; we called 
one another to the window if a large dog went by 
our door ; and Avhole days passed without the move- 
ment of any wheels but the butcher's upon our 
street, which flourished in ragweed and butter-cups 
and daisies, and in the autumn burned, like the 
borders of nearly all the streets in Charlesbridge, 
with the pallid azure flame of the succor)'". The 
neighborhood was in all things a frontier between 
city and country. The horse-cars, the type of such 



14 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

civilization — full of imposture, discomfort, and sul)- 
lime possibility — as we yet possess, went by the 
head of our street, and might, perhaps, be available 
to one skilled in calculating the movements of 
comets ; while two minutes' walk would take us into 
a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visible 
through the trees. We learned, like innocent pas- 
toral people of the golden age, to know the several 
voices of the cows pastured in the vacant lots, and, 
like ensine-drivers of the iron acje, tO' distinguish the 
different whistles of the locomotives passing on the 
neicrhborino; railroad. The trains shook the house 
as they thundered along, and at night were a kind 
of company, while by day we had the society of the 
innumerable birds. Now and then, also, the little 
ragged boys in charge of the cows — which, tied by 
long ropes to trees, forever wound themselves tight 
up against the trunks, and had to be unwoimd with 
PTeat ado of hootino- and hammering — came and 
peered lustfully through the gate at our ripening 
pears. All round us carpenters were at work build- 
ing new houses ; but so far from troubling us, the 
strokes of their hammers fell softly upon the sense, 
like one's heart -beats upon one's own consciousness 
in the lapse from all fear of pain under the blessed 
charm of an anaesthetic. 

We played a little at gardening, of course, and 
planted tomatoes, which the chickens seemed to like, 
for they ate them up as fast as they ripened ; and 
we watched with pride the growth of our Lawton 
blackberries, which, after attaining the most stal- 



MES. JOHNSON. 15 

wart proportions, were still as bitter as the scrub- 
biest of their savage brethren, and which, when by 
advice left on the vines for a week after they turned 
black, were silently gorged by secret and gluttonous 
flocks of robins and orioles. As for our grapes, the 
rVost cut them off in the hour of their triumph. 

So, as I have hinted, we were not surprised that 
•Jenny should be willing to remain with us, and were 
xs little prepared for her desertion as for any other 
change of our moral state. But one day in Septem- 
ber she came to her nominal mistress with tears in 
her beautiful eyes and protestations of unexampled 
devotion upon her tongue, and said that she was 
afraid she must leave us. She liked the place, and 
she never had worked for any one that was more of 
a lady, but she had made up her mind to go into the 
city. All this, so far, was quite in the manner of 
domestics who, in ghost stories, irive warnino- to the 
occupants of haunted houses ; and Jenny's mistress 
listened in suspense for the motive of her desertion, 
expecting to hear no less than that it was something 
which walked up and down the stairs and dragged 
iron links after it, or something that came an<l 
groaned at the front door, like populace dissatisfied 
with a political candidate. But it was in fact noth- 
ing of this kind ; simply, there were no lamps upon 
our street, and Jenny, after spending Sunday even 
incf with friends in East Charlesbrido;e, was alwavs 
alarmed, on her return, in walking from the horse- 
car to our door. The case was hopeless, and Jenny 
and our household parted with respect and regret. 



16 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

We had not before this thoujrht it a m-ave disad- 
vantag-e that our street was unHo-hted. Our street 
was not drained nor graded ; no municipal cart ever 
came to carry away our ashes ; there was not a 
Avater-butt within hah" a mile to save us from fire, 
nor more than the one tliousandth part of a police- 
man to protect us from theft. Yet, as I paid a heavy 
tax, I somehow felt that we enjoyed the benefits of 
city government, and never looked upon Charles- 
bridge as in any way undesirable for residence. But 
when it became necessary to find help in Jenny's 
place, the frosty welcome given to application at the 
intelligence offices renewed a painful doubt awakened 
by her departure. To be sure, the heads of the 
offices were polite enough ; but when the youno- 
housekeeper had stated her case at the first to which 
she apj)lied, and the Intelligencer had called out to 
the invisible expectants in the adjoining room, 
" Anny wan wants to do giner'l housewark in 
Charlsbrudge ? " there came from the maids invoked 
so loud, so fierce, so full a " No ! " as shook the 
lady's heart with an indescribable shame and dread. 
The name that, with an innocent pride in its literary 
and historical associations, she had written at the 
heads of her letters, was suddenly become a matter 
of reproach to her ; and she was almost tempted to 
conceal thereafter that she lived in Charlesbrido-e, 
and to pretend that she dwelt upon some wretched 
little street in Boston. " You see," said the head of 
the office, " the gairls doesn't like to live so far away 
from the city. Now if it was on'y in the Port . . . . " 



MRS. JOHNSON. 17 

This pen is not graphic enough to give the remote 
reader an idea of the affront offered to an inhab- 
itant of Old Charlesbridge in these closing words. 
Neither am I of sufficiently tragic mood to report 
here all the sufferings undergone by an unhappy fam- 
ily in finding servants, or to tell how the winter was 
passed with miserable makeshifts. Alas ! is it not 
the history of a thousand experiences ? Any one 
who looks upon this page could match it with a tale 
as full of heartbreak and disaster, while I conceive 
that, in hastening to speak of Mrs. Johnson, I ap- 
proach a subject of unique interest. 

The winter that ensued after Jenny's departure 
was the true sister of the bitter and shrewish spring 
of the same year. But indeed it is always with a 
secret shiver that one must think of winter in our 
regrettable climate. It is a terrible potency, robbing 
us of half our lives, and threatening or desolating 
the moiety left us with rheumatisms and catarrhs. 
There is a much vaster sum of enjoyment possible to 
man in the more generous latitudes ; and I have 
sometimes doubted whether even the energy charac- 
teristic of ours is altogether to be praised, seeing 
that it has its spring not so much in pure aspiration as 
in the instinct of self-preservation. Egyptian, Greek, 
Roman energy was an inner impulse ; but ours is 
too often the sting of cold, the spur of famine. We 
must endure our winter, but let us not be guilty of 
the hypocrisy of pretending that we like it. Let us 
caress it with no more vain compliments, but use it 
with something of its own rude and savage sincerity. 



18 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

I say, our last Irish girl went with the last snow, 
and on one of those midsummer-like days that some- 
times fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate 
zone, oxu' hearts sang of Afi'ica and golden joys. A 
Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, 
if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a 
handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some 
sable maid with crisped locks, whom, uncoffling 
from the captive train beside the desert, we should 
make to do our general housework forever, through 
the right of lawful purchase. But we knew that 
this was impossible, and that, if we desired colored 
help, we must seek it at the intelligence office, which 
is in one of those streets chiefly inhabited by the 
orphaned children and grandchildren of slavery. 
To tell the truth these orphans do not seem to grieve 
much for their bereavement, but lead a life of joyous 
and rather indolent oblivion in their quarter of the 
city. They are often to be seen sauntering up and 
down the street by which the Charlesbridge cars 
arrive, — the young with a harmless swagger, and 
the old with the generic limp which our Autocrat has 
already noted as attending advanced years in their 
race. They seem the natural luiman interest of a 
street so largely devoted to old clothes ; and the 
thoughtful may see a felicity in their presence wher'^ 
the pawnbrokers' windows display the forfeited 
pledges of improvidence, and subtly remind us that 
we have yet to redeem a whole race, pawned in our 
needy and reckless national youth, and still held 
against us by the Uncle of Injustice, who is also the 



MRS. JOHNSON. 19 

Father of Lies. How gayly are the young ladles of 
this race attired, as they trip up and down the side- 
walks, and in and out through the pendent garments 
at the shop doors ! They are the black pansies and 
marigolds and dark-blooded dahlias amono; woman- 
kind. They try to assume something of our colder 
race's demeanor, but even the passer on the horse- 
car can see that it is not native with them, and is 
better pleased when they forget us, and ungenteelly 
laucrh in encounterino; friends, letting their white 
teeth glitter through the generous lips that open to 
their ears. In the streets branching upwards from 
this avenue, very little colored men and maids play 
with broken or enfeebled toys, or sport on the wooden 
pavements of the entrances to the inner courts. 
Now and then a colored soldier or sailor — looking 
strange in his uniform, even after the custom of 
several years — emerges from those passages ; or, 
more rarely, a black gentleman, stricken in years, 
and cased in shining broadcloth, walks solidly down 
the brick sidewalk, cane in hand, — a vision of 
serene self-complacency, and so plainly the expres- 
sion of virtuous public sentiment that the great col- 
ored louts, innocent enough till then in their idleness, 
are taken with a sudden sense of depravity, and loaf 
guiltily up against the house-walls. At the same 
moment, perhaps, a young damsel, amorously scuf- 
fling with' an admirer through one of the low open 
windows, suspends the strife, and bids him, " Go 
along now, do ! " More rarely yet than the gentle- 
man described, one may see a white girl among the 



20 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

dark neighbors, whose frowzy head is uncovered, 
and whose sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and 
who, though no doubt quite at home, looks as strange 
there as that pale anomaly which may sometimes be 
seen amono- a crew of blackbirds. 

An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and 
yet hardly of unthrift, seems to prevail in the neigh- 
borhood, which has none of the aggressive and im- 
pudent squalor of an Irish quarter, and none of the 
surly wickedness of a low American street. A gay- 
ety not born of the things that bring its serious joy 
to the true New England heart — a ragged gayety, 
which comes of summer in the blood, and not in the 
pocket or the conscience, and which affects the coun- 
tenance and the whole demeanor, setting the feet to 
some inward music, and at times bursting into a line 
of song or a child-like and irresponsible laugh — gives 
tone to the visible life, and wakens a very friendly 
spirit in the passer, who somehow thinks there of a 
milder climate, and is half persuaded that the 
orange-peel on the sidewalks came from fruit grown 
in the soft atmosphere of those back courts. 

It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. 
Johnson ; and it was from a colored boarding-house 
there that she came out to Charlesbridge to look at 
us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her. 
She was a matron of mature age and portly figure, 
with a complexion like coffee soothed with the rich- 
est cream ; and her manners were so full of a certain 
tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all our 
will to ask for references. It was only her barbaric 



MRS. JOHNSON. 21 

laughter and her lawless eye that betrayed ho-w 
slightly her New England birth and breeding cov- 
ered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a 
thousand years of civilization that lay between her 
race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged 
by descent ; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wild- 
ness mixed with that of the desert in her veins : her 
grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestors on this 
side had probably sold their lands for the same value 
in trinkets that bought the original African pair on 
the other side. 

The first day that Mrs. Johnson descended into 
our kitchen, she conjured from the malicious disorder 
in which it had been left by the flitting Irish kobold 
a dinner that revealed the inspirations of genius, and 
was quite different from a dinner of mere routine 
and laborious talent. Something original and au- 
thentic mingled with the accustomed flavors ; and, 
thouah vao-ue reminiscences of canal-boat travel and 
woodland camps arose from the relish of certain of 
the dishes, there was yet the assurance of such power 
in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to 
be merely running over the chords of our appetite 
with preliminary savors, as a musician acquaints his 
touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before 
breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. 
Within a week she had mastered her instrument ; 
and thereafter there was no faltering in her perform- 
ances, which she varied constantly, through inspira- 
tion or from suggestion. She was so quick to receive 
new ideas in her art, that, when the Roman statuary 



22 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

who stayed a few weeks with us explained the mys- 
tery of various purely Latin dishes, she caught their 
principle at once ; and visions of the great white 
cathedral, the Coliseum, and the " dome of Brunel- 
leschi " floated before us in tlie exhalations of the 
Milanese risotto, Roman ftufadino, and Florentine 
sfracotto that smoked upon our board. But, after 
all, it was in puddings that Mrs. Johnson chiefly 
excelled. She was one of those cooks — rare as men 
of genius in literature — who love their own dishes ; 
and she had, in her personally child-like simplicity of 
taste, and the inherited appetites of her savage fore- 
fathers, a dominant passion for sweets. So far as we 
could learn, she subsisted principally upon puddings 
and tea. Through the same primitive instincts, iio 
doubt, she loved praise. She openly exulted in our 
artless flatteries of her skill ; she waited jealously at 
the head of the kitchen stairs to hear what was said 
of her work, especially if there were guests ; and 
she was never too weary to attempt emprises of 
cookery. 

While engaged in these, she wore a species of 
sightly handkerchief like a turban upon her head, 
and about her person those mystical swathings in 
which old ladies of the African race delight. But 
she most pleasured our sense of beauty and moi-al 
fitness when, after the last pan was washed and the 
last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, 
taking her stand at the kitchen door, laded the soft 
evening air with its pungent odors. ■ If we surprised 
her at these supreme moments, she took the pipe 



MRS. JOHNSON. 23 

from her lips, and put it behind her, with a low, 
mellow chuckle, and a look of half-defiant conscious- 
ness ; never guessing that none of her merits took 
us half so much as the cheerful vice which she only 
feigned to conceal. 

Some things she could not do so perfectly as cook- 
ing, because of her failing eyesight ; and we pex'- 
suaded her that spectacles would both become and 
befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a 
pair of steel-bowed glasses. She wore them in some 
great emergencies at first, but had clearly no pride 
in them. Before lonfj she laid them aside altogether, 
and they had passed from our thoughts, when one 
day we heard her mellow note of laughter and her 
daughter's harsher cackle outside our door, and, 
opening it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spec- 
tacles of massive frame. We then learned that their 
purchase was in fulfillment of a vow made long ago, 
in the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever she wore 
glasses, they should be gold-bowed ; and I hope the 
manes of the dead were half as happy in these votive 
spectacles as the simple soul that ofi^ered them. 

She and her late partner were the parents of 
eleven children, some of whom were dead, and 
some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts. 
During his life-time she had kept a little shop in her 
native town ; and it was only within a few years that 
she had gone into service. She cherished a natural 
haughtiness of spirit, and resented control, although 
disposed to do all she could of her own motion.. 
Being told to say when she wanted an afternoon, 



24 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

she explained that when she wanted an afternoon 
she always took it without asking, but always planned 
so as not to discommode the ladies with whom she 
lived. These, she said, had numbered twenty-seven 
within three years, which made us doubt the success 
of her system in all cases, though she merely held 
out the fact as an assurance of her faith in the fu- 
ture, and a proof of the ease with which places were 
to be found. She contended, moreover, that a lady 
who had for thirty years had a house of her own, 
was in nowise bound lo ask permission to receive 
visits from friends where she mifjht be livino;, but 
that they ought freely to come and go like other 
guests. In this spirit she once invited her son-in- 
law, Professor Jones of Providence, to dine with 
her; and her defied mistress, on entering the dining- 
room, found the Professor at pudding and tea there, 
— an impressively respectable figure in black clothes, 
with a black face rendered yet more effective by a 
pair of green goggles. It appeared that this dark 
professor was a light of phrenology in Rhode Island, 
and that he was believed to have uncommon virtue 
in his science by reason of being blind as Avell as 
black. 

I am loath to confess that Mrs. Johnson had not a 
flattering opinion of the Caucasian race in all re- 
spects. In fact, she liad very good philosophical and 
Scriptural reasons for looking upon lis as an upstart 
people of new blood, who had come into their wliite- 
ness by no creditable or pleasant process. The late 
Mr. Johnson, who had died in the West Indies, 



MRS. JOHNSON. 25 

whither he voyaged for his health in quahty of cook 
upon a Down-East schooner, was a man of letters, 
and had written a book to show the superiority of 
the black over the white branches of the human 
family. In this he held that, as all islands have been 
at their discovery found peopled by blacks, Ave must 
needs believe that humanity was first created of that 
color. Mrs. Johnson could not show us her hus- 
band's Avork (a sole copy in the library of an Eng- 
lish gentleman at Port au Prince is not to be bought 
for money), but she often developed its arguments 
•to the lady of the house ; and one day, with a great 
show of reluctance, and many protests that no per- 
sonal slight was meant, let foil the fact that Mr. 
Johnson believed the white race descended from 
Gehazi the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman 
fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to his 
original blackness. " And he went out from his 
presence a leper as white as snow," said Mrs. John- 
son, quoting irrefutable Scripture. " Leprosy, lep- 
rosy," she added thoughtfully, — " nothing but lep- 
rosy bleached you out." 

It seems to me much in her praise that she did not 
exult in our taint and degradation, as some white 
philosophers used to do in the opposite idea that a 
part of the human family were cursed to lasting 
blackness and slavery in Ham and his children, but 
even told us of a remarkable approach to whiteness 
in many of her own offspring. In a kindred spirit 
of charity, no doubt, she refused ever to attend 
church Avith people of her elder and AA'holesomer 



26 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

blood. When she went to church, she said, she 
always went to a white chui'ch, though while with 
us I am hound to say she never went to any. She 
professed to read her Bible in her bedroom on Sun- 
days ; hut we suspected, from certain sounds and 
odors which used to steal out of this sanctuary, that 
her piety more commonly found expression in dozing 
and smokino;. 

I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. 
Johnson's anxiety to ckaim honor for the African 
color, while denying this color in many of her own 
family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all» 
her people must endure, however proudly they hide 
it or light-heartedly forget it, -from the despite and 
contumely to which they are guiltlessly born ; and 
Avhen I thought how irreparable was this disgrace 
and calamity of a black skin, and how irreparable it 
must be for ages yet, in this world where every other 
shame and all manner of wilful guilt and wickedness 
may hope for covert and pardon, I had little heart 
to laugh. Indeed, it was so pathetic to hear this 
poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try, 
in spite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own 
arrogant generalizations, to establish their whiteness, 
that Ave must have been very cruel and silly people 
to turn her sacred fiibles even into matter of ques- 
tion. I have no doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia 
and her Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce — it is impos- 
sible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of 
the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's family — have 
as light skins and as golden hair in heaven as her 



MRS. JOHNSON. 27 

reverend maternal fancy painted for them in our 
world. There, certainly, they would not be subject to 
tanning, which had ruined the delicate complexion, 
and had knotted into black woolly tangles the once 
wavy blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi 3 
and I would fain believe that Toussaint Washington 
Johnson, who ran away to sea so many years ago, 
has found some fortunate zone where his hair and 
skin keep the same sunny and rosy tints they wore 
to his mother's eyes in infancy. But I have no 
means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was 
the prodigy of intellect that he was declared to be. 
Naomi could no more be taken in proof of the one 
assertion than of the other. When she came to us, 
it was agreed that she should go to school ; but she 
overruled her mother in this as in everything else, 
and never went. Except Sunday-school lessons, she 
had no other instruction than that her mistress gave 
her in the evenings, when a heavy day's play and 
the natural influences of the hour conspired with 
original causes to render her powerless before words 
of one syllable. 

The first week of her service she was obedient 
and faithful to her duties ; but, relaxing in the at- 
mospliere of a house which seems to demoralize all 
menials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of lying 
in wait for callers out of doors, and, when people 
rang, of running up the front steps, and letting them 
in from the outside. As the season expanded, and 
the fine weather became confirmed, she modified 
even this form of service, and spent her time in the 



28 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

fields, appearing at the house only when nature 
importunately craved molasses. She had a paiTot- 
like quickness, so far as music was concerned, and 
learned from the Roman statuary to make the groves 
and half-finished houses resound, 

" Camicia rossa, 
Ore t' ascondi ? 
T' appella Italia, — 
Tu non respondi ! " 

She taught the Garibaldi song, moreover, to all 
the neighboring children, so that 1 sometimes won- 
dered if our street were not about to march upon 
Rome in a body. 

In her untamable disobedience, Naomi alone be- 
trayed her sylvan blood, for she was in all other 
respects negro and not Indian. But it was of 
her aboriginal ancestry that Mrs. Johnson chiefly 
boasted, — when not engaged in argument to main- 
tain the superiority of the African race. She loved 
to descant upon it as the cause and explanation of 
her own arrogant habit of feeling ; and she seemed 
indeed to have inherited something of the Indian's 
hauteur along with the Ethiop's supple cunning and 
abundant amiability. She gave many instances in 
which her pride had met and overcome the insolence 
of employers, and the kindly old creature was by no 
means singular in her pride of being reputed proud. 

She could never have been a woman of strono- 
logical faculties, but she had in some things a very 
surprising and awful astuteness. She seldom intro- 
duced any purpose directly, but bore all about it, 



MRS. JOHNSON. 29 

and then suddenly sprung it upon her unprepared 
antagonist. At other times she obscurely hinted a 
reason, and left a conclusion to be inferred ; as when 
she warded off reproach for some delinquency by 
saying in a general Avay that she had lived with 
ladies who used to come scolding into the kitchen 
after they had taken their bitters. " Quality ladies 
took their bitters regular," she added, to remove any 
sting of personality from her remark ; for, from many 
tliinos she had let fall, we knew that she did not 
regard us as quality. On the contrary, she often 
tried to overbear us with the gentility of her former 
places ; and would tell the lady over whom she 
reigned, that she had lived with folks worth their 
three and four hundred thousand dollars, who never 
com])lained as she did of the ironing. Yet she had 
a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of the 
family, Mr. Johnson having been an author. She 
even professed to have herself written a book, which 
was still in manuscript, and preserved somewhere 
among her best clothes. 

It was well, on many accounts, to be in contact 
with a mind so original and suggestive as Mrs. John- 
son's. We loved to trace its intricate yet often 
transparent operations, and were perhaps too fond 
of explaining its peculiarities by facts of ancestry, — 
of finding hints of the Powwow or the Grand Cus- 
tom in each grotesque development. We were con- 
scious of somethino; warmer in this old soul than in 
ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to 
think it the tropic and the untracked forest. Shf* 



30 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

had scarcely any being apart from her affection ; she 
had no morality, but was good because she neither 
hated nor envied ; and she might have been a saint 
far more easily than far more civilized people. 

There was that also in her sinuous yet malleable 
nature, so full of guile and so full of goodness, that 
reminded us pleasantly of lowly folk in elder lands, 
where relaxing oppressions have lifted the restraints 
of fear between master amd servant, without disturb- 
ing the familiarity of their relation. She advised 
freely with us upon all household matters, and took 
a motherly interest in whatever concerned us. She 
could be flattered or caressed into almost any service, 
but no threat or command could move her. When 
she erred, she never acknowledged her wrong in 
words, but handsomely expi-essed her regrets in a 
pudding, or sent up her apologies in a favorite dish 
secretly prepared. We grew so well used to this 
form of exculpation, that, whenever Mrs. Johnson 
took an afternoon at an inconvenient season, we 
knew that for a week afterwards we should be feasted 
like princes. She owned frankly that she loved us, 
that she never had done half so much for people 
before, and that she never had been nearly so well 
suited in any other place ; and for a brief and happy 
time we thought that we never should part. 

One day, however, our dividing destiny appeared 
in the basement, and was presented to us as Hip- 
polyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson, who had 
just arrived on a visit to his mother from the State 
of New Hampshire. He was a heavy and loutish 



MRS. JOHNSON. 31 

vouth, standing upon the borders of boyhood, and 
lookhio; forward to the futui'e with a vacant and hst- 
less eye. I mean that this was liis figurative atti- 
tude ; his actual manner, as he lolled upon a chair 
beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric, that we 
felt a little uncertain how to regard him, and Mrs. 
Johnson openly described him as peculiar. He was 
so deeply tanned by the fervid suns of the New 
Hampshire winter, and his hair had so far suffered 
from the example of the sheep lately under hia 
charge, that he could not be classed by any stretch 
of compassion with the blonde and straight-haired 
members of Mrs. Johnson's ftimily. 

He remained with us all the first day until late In 
the afternoon, when his mother took him out to get 
him a boarding-house. Then he departed in the 
van of her and Naomi, pausing at the gate to collect 
his spirits, and, after he had sufficiently animated 
himself by clapping his palms together, starting off" 
down the street at a hand-gallop, to the manifest 
terror of the cows in the pastures, and the confusion 
of the less demonstrative people of our household. 
Other characteristic traits appeared in Hippolyto 
Thucydides within no veiy long period of time, and 
he ran away fi-om his lodgings so often during the 
summer that he might be said to board round amona 
the outlying corn-fields and turnip-patches of Charles- 
bridge. As a check upon this habit, Mrs. Johnson 
seemed to have invited him to spend his whole time 
in our basement ; for whenever we went below we 
found him there, balanced — perhaps in homage to 



32 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

US, and perhaps as a token of extreme sensibility in 
himself — upon the low window-sill, the bottoms of 
his boots touching the floor inside, and his face buried 
in the grass without. 

We could formulate no very tenable objection to 
all this, and yet the presence of Thucydides in our 
kitchen unaccountably oppressed our imaginations. 
We beheld him all over the house, a monstrous 
eidolon, balanced upon every window-sill ; and he 
certainly attracted unpleasant notice to our place, no 
less by his furtive and hang-dog manner of arrival 
than by the bold displays with which he celebrated 
his departures. We hinted this to Mrs. Johnson, 
but she could not enter into our feeling. Indeed, all 
the wild poetry of her maternal and primitive nature 
seemed to cast itself about this hapless boy ; and if 
we had listened to her we should have believed there 
was no one so agreeable in society, or so quick-witted 
in affairs, as Hippolyto, when he chose. She used 
to rehearse us long epics concerning his industry,. his 
courage, and his talent ; and she put fine speeches in 
his mouth with no more regard to the truth than if 
she had been a historian, and not a poet. Perhaps 
she believed that he really said and did the things 
she attributed to him : it is the destiny of those who 
rejDcatedly tell great things either of themselves or 
others ; and I think we may readily forgive the illu- 
sion to her zeal and fondness. In fact, she was not 
a wise woman, and she spoiled her children as if she 
had been a rich one. 

At last, when we said- positively that Thucydides 



MRS. JOHNSON. 33 

should come to us no more, and then qualified the 
prohibition by allowing him to come every Sunday, 
she answered that she never would hurt the child's 
feelings by telling him not to come where his mother 
was ; that people who did not love her children did 
not love her; and that, if Hippy went, she went. 
We thought it a master-stroke of firmness to rejoin 
that Hippolyto must, go in any event ; but I am 
bound to own that he did not go, and that his mother 
stayed, and so fed us with every cunning propitiatory 
dainty, that we must have been Pagans to renew 
our threat. In fact, we begged Mrs. Johnson to go 
into the country with us, and she, after long reluc- 
tation on Hippy's account, consented, agreeing to 
send him away to friends during her absence. 

We made every preparation, and on the eve of 
our departure Mrs. Johnson went into the city to 
engage her son's passage to Bangor, while we awaited 
her return in untroubled security. 

But she did not appear till midnight, and then re- 
sponded with but a sad " Well, sah ! " to the cheer- 
ful " Well, Mrs. Johnson ! " that greeted her. 

" All right, Mrs. Johnson ? " 

Mrs. Johnson made a strange noise, half chuckle 
and half death-rattle, in her throat. " All wrong, 
sah. Hippy's off again ; and I've been all over 
the city after him." 

" Then vou can't go with us in the mornino- ? " 

" How can Tf, sah ? " 

Mrs. Johnson went sadly out of the room. Then 



34 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

she came back to the door again, and, opening it, 
uttered, for the first time in our service, words of 
apology and regret : " I hope I ha'n't put you out 
any. I wanted to go with you, but I ought to knowed 
I couldn't. All is, I loved you too much." 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 

Vagabonds tlie world would no doubt call many 
of my doorstep acquaintance, and I do not attempt 
to defend them altogether against the world, which 
paints but black and white and in general terms. 
Yet I would fain veil what is only half-truth under 
another name, for I know that the service of their 
Gay Science is not one of such disgraceful ease as 
we associate with ideas of vagrancy, though I must 
own that they lead the life they do because they 
love it. They always protest that nothing but their 
ignorance of our tongue prevents them from practic- 
ing some mechanical trade. " What work could be 
harder," they ask, " than carrying this organ about 
all day ? " but while I answer with honesty that 
nothing can be more irksome, I feel that they only 
pretend a disgust with it, and that they really like 
organ- grinding, if for no otlier reason than that they 
are the children of the svimmer, and it takes them 
into the beloved open weather. One of my friends, 
at least, who in the warmer months is to all appear- 
ance a blithesome troubadour, living 

" A merry life in sun and shade," 

is a coal-heaver in Avinter ; and though this more 
honorable and useful occupation is doubtless open to 



36 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

nim the whole year round, yet he does not devote 
himself to it, but prefers with the expanding spring 
to lay aside his grimy basket, and, shouldering his 
organ, to quit the dismal wharves and carts and cel- 
lars, and to wander forth into the suburbs, with his 
lazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing 
with his tambourine but take up a collection, and 
who, meeting me the other day in a chance passage 
of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of 
his father's personal history. 

It was winter even there in Ferry Street, in which 
so many Italians live that one might think to find it 
under a softer sky and in a gentler air, and which I 
had always figured in a wide unlikeness to ^11 other 
streets in Boston, — with houses stuccoed outside, 
and with gratings at their ground-floor windows ; 
with mouldering archways between the buildings, 
and at the corners feeble lamps glimmering before 
pictures of the Madonna ; with weather-beaten 
shutters flapping overhead, and many balconies from 
which hung the linen swathings of young infants, 
and love-making maidens furtively lured the velvet- 
jacketed, leisui'ely youth below : a place haunted 
by windy voices of blessing and cursing, Avith the 
perpetual clack of wooden-heeled shoes upon the 
stones, and what perfume from the blossom of vines 
and almond-trees, mingling with less delicate smells, 
the travelled reader pleases to imagine. I do not 
say that I found Ferry Street actually different from 
this vision in most respects ; but as for the vines and 
almond-trees, they were not in bloom at the moment 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 37 

of my encounter witli the little tambourine-boy. At 
we stood and talked, the snow fell as heavily and 
thickly around us as elsewhere in Boston. With a 
vague pain, — the envy of a race toward another 
born to a happier clime, — I heard from him that his 
whole family was going back to Italy in a month. 
The father had at last got together money enough, 
and the mother, who had long been an invalid, must 
be taken home ; and, so far as I know, the population 
of Ferry Street exists but in the hope of a return, 
soon or late, to the native or the ancestral land. 

More than one of my doorstep acquaintance, in 
fact, seemed to have no other stock in trade than 
this fond desire, and to thrive with it in our sympa- 
thetic community. It is scarcely possible but the 
reader has met the widow of Giovanni Cascamatto, 
a Vesuvian lunatic who has long set fire to their 
home on the slopes of the volcano, and perished in 
the flames. She was our first Italian acquaintance 
in Charlesbridge, presenting herself with a little 
subscription-book which she sent in for inspection, 
with a printed certificate to the facts of her history 
signed with the somewhat conventionally Saxon 
names of William Tompkins and John Johnson. 
These gentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can 
be reproduced, that her object in coming to America 
was to get money to go back to Italy ; and the whole 
document had so fictitious an air that it made us 
doubt even the nationality of the bearer ; but we 
were put to shame by the decent joy she manifested 
in an Italian salutation. There was no loncjer a 



38 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

question of imposture in anybody's mind ; we gladly 
paid tribute to her poetic fiction, and she thanked us 
with a tranquil courtesy that placed the obligation 
where it belonged. As she turned to go with many 
good wishes, we pressed her to have some dinner, 
but she answered with a compliment insurpassably 
flattering, she had just dined — in another palace. 
The truth is, there is not a single palace on Benicia 
Street, and our little box of pine and paper would 
hardly have passed for a palace on the stage, where 
these things are often contrived with great simplic- 
ity; but as we had made a little Italy together, she 
touched it with the exquisite politeness of her race, 
and it became for the instant a lordly mansion, stand- 
ing on the Chiaja, or the Via Nuovissima, or the 
Canalazzo. 

I say this woman seemed glad to be greeted in 
Italian, but not, so far as I could see, surprised ; and 
altogether the most amazing thing about my doorstep 
acquaintance of her nation is, that they are never 
surprised to be spoken to in their own tongue, or, if 
they are-, never show it. A chestnut-roaster, who 
has sold me twice the chestnuts the same money 
would have bought of him in English, has not other- 
wise recognized the fact that Tuscan is not the dia- 
lect of Charlesbridge, and the mortifying nonchalance 
with which my advances have always been received 
has long since persuaded me that to the grinder at 
the gate it is not remarkable that a man should open 
the door of his wooden house on Benicia Street, and 
welcome him in his native languaffe. After the first 



DOOKSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 39 

shock of this indlfFerence is past, it is not to be ques- 
tioned but it flatters with an iflusion, which a stare 
of amazement would forbid, reducing the encounter 
to a vulgar reality at once, and I could almost be- 
lieve it in those wily and amiable folk to intend the 
sweeter effect of their unconcern, which tacitly im- 
plies that there is no other tongue in the world buL 
Italian, and which makes all the earth and air Ital 
ian for the time. Nothing else could have been tht 
purpose of that image-dealer whom I saw on a sum- 
mer's day lying at the foot of one of our meeting- 
houses, and doing his best to make it a cathedral, 
and really giving a sentiment of medigeval art to the 
noble sculptures of the fagade which the carpenters 
had just nailed up, freshly painted and newly re- 
paired. This poet w^as stretched upon his back, 
eating, in that convenient posture, his dinner out of 
an earthen pot, plucking the viand from it, whatever 
it was, with his thumb and fore-finger, and dropping 
it piecemeal into his mouth. When the passer asked 
him " Where are you from ? " he held a morsel in 
air long enough to answer " Da Lucca, signore,'' and 
then let it fall into his throat, and sank deeper into a 
reverie in which that crude accent even must have 
sounded like a gossip's or a kinsman's voice, but 
never otherwise moved muscle, nor looked to see 
who passed or lingered. There could have been 
kittle else in his circumstances to remind him of 
home, and if he was really in the sort of day-dream 
attributed to him, he was wise not to look about him. 
I have not myself been in Lucca, but I conceive that 



40 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

its piazza is not like our square, with a pump and 
horse-trough in the midst ; but that it has probably a 
fountain and statuary, though not possibly so mag- 
nificent an elm towering above the bronze or marble 
groups as spreads its boughs of benison over our 
pump and the horse-car switchman, loitering near it 
to set the switch for the arriving cars, or lift the 
brimming buckets to the smoking nostrils of the 
horses, while out from the stable comes clanging and 
bano-iniT with a fresh team that famous African who 
has turned white, or, if he is off duty, one of his 
brethren who has not yet begun to turn. Figure, 
besides, an expressman watering his horse at the 
trough, a provision-cart backed up against the curb 
in front of one of the stores, various people looking 
from the car-office windows, and a conductor appear- 
ing at the door long enough to call out, " Ready for 
Boston! " — and you have a scene of such gayety as 
Lucca could never have witnessed in her piazza at 
high noon on a summer's day. Even our Campo 
Santo, if the Lucchese had cared to look round the 
corner of the meeting-house at its moss-grown head 
stones, could have had little to remind him of home, 
though it has antiquity and a proper quaintness. 
But not for him, not for them of his clime and faith, 
is the pathos of those simple memorial slates with 
their winged skulls, changing upon many later stones, 
as if by the softening of creeds and customs, to 
cherub's heads, — not for him is the pang I feel 
because of those who died, in our country's youth, 
exiles or exiles' children, heirs of the wilderness and 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 41 

toil and hardship. Could they rise from their restful 
beds, and look on this wandering Italian with his 
plaster statuettes of Apollo, and Canovan dancers 
and deities, they would hold his wares little better 
than Romish saints and idolatries, and would scarcely 
have the sentimental interest in him felt by the mod- 
ern citizen of Charlesbridge ; but I think that even 
they must have respected that Lombard scissors- 
grinder who used to come to us, and put an edge to 
all the cutlery in the house. 

He has since gone back to Milan, whence he came 
eigliteen years ago, and whither he has returned, — 
as he told me one acute day in the fall, when all the 
winter hinted itself, and the painted leaves shuddered 
earthward in the grove across the way, — to enjoy a 
little climate before he died (/>er goder un po' dl clima 
prima di morire). Our climate was the only thing 
he had against us ; in every other respect he was a 
New-Englander, even to the early stages of con- 
sumption. He told me the story of his whole life, 
and of how in his adventurous youth he had left 
Milan and sojourned some years in Naples, vainly 
seeking his fortune there. Afterwards he went to 
Greece, and set up his ancestral business of green- 
grocer in Athens, faring there no better, but rather 
worse than in Naples, because of the deeper wicked- 
ness of the Athenians, who cheated him right and 
left, and whose laws gave him no redress. The 
Neapolitans were bad enough, he said, making a wry 
face, but the Greeks ! — and he spat the Greeks out 
on the grass. At last, after much misfortune in 



42 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

Europe, he betliouglit liim of coming to America, 
and he had never regretted it, but for the cHmate. 
You spent a good deal here, — nearly all you earned, 
— but then a poor man was a man, and the people 
were honest. It was wonderfal to him that they all 
knew how to read and write, and he viewed with 
inexpressible scorn those Irish who came to this 
country, and were so little sensible of the benefits it 
conferred upon them. Boston he believed the best 
city in America, and " Tell me," said he, " is there 
such a thing anywhere else in the world as that 
Public Library ? " He, a poor man, and almost 
unknown, had taken books from it to his own room, 
and was master to do so whenever he liked. He 
had thus been enabled to read Botta's history of the 
United States, an enormous compliment both to the 
country and the work which I doubt ever to have 
been paid before ; and he knew more about Wash- 
ington than I did, and desired to know more than I 
could tell him of the financial question among us. 
So we came to national politics, and then to Euro- 
pean affairs. " It appears that Garibaldi will not go 
to Rome this year," remarks my scissors-grinder, 
who is very red in his sympathies. " The Emperor 
forbids ! Well, patience ! And that blessed Pope, 
what does he want, that Pope ? He will be king 
and priest both, he will wear two pairs of shoes at 
once ! " I must confess that no other of my door- 
step acquaintance had so clear an idea as this one of 
the difference between things here and at home. To 
the minds of most we seemed divided here as there 




" But I .suitjiusL' this wine is not made of j^rapes, signer? " See pasre 43. 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 43 

into rich and poor, — signori^ persone civili, and 
povera gente, — and their thoughts about us did not 
go beyond a speculation as to our individual willing- 
ness or ability to pay for organ -grinding. But this 
Lombard was worthy of his adopted country, and J 
forgive him the frank expression of a doubt that one 
day occurred to him, when offered a glass of Italian 
wine. He held it daintily between him and the sun 
for a smiling moment, and then said, as if our wine 
must needs be as ungenuine as our Italian, — was 
perhaps some expression from the surrouncUng cur- 
rant-bushes, harsh as that from the Northern tongues 
which could never give his language the true life 
and tonic charm, — " But I suppose this wine is not 
made of grapes, signor ? " Yet he was a very cour- 
teous old man, elaborate in greeting and leave-taking, 
and with a quicker sense than usual. It was ac- 
counted delicacy in him, that, when he had bidden- 
us a final adieu, he should never come near us again, 
though the date of his departure was postponed some 
weeks, and we heard him tinkling down the street, 
and stopping at the neighbors' houses. He was a 
keen-faced, thoughtful-looking man ; and he wore a 
blouse of blue cotton, from the pocket of which 
always dangled the leaves of some wild salad culled 
from our wasteful vacant lots or prodigal waysides. 

Altogether different in character was that Triest- 
ine, who came one evening to be helped home at the 
close of a very disastrous career in Mexico. He 
was a person of innumerable bows, and fluttered 
his bright-colored compliments about, till it appeared 



44 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

that never before had such amiable people been 
asked charity by such a worthy and generous suf- 
ferer. In Trieste he had been a journalist, and it 
was evident enough from his speech that he was of 
a good education. He was vain of his Italian accent, 
which was peculiarly good for his heterogeneously 
peopled native city ; and he made a show of that 
marvelous facility of the Triestines in languages, by 
taking me down French books, Spanish books, Ger- 
man books, and reading from them all with the prop- 
erest accent. Yet with this boyish pride and self- 
satisfaction there was mixed a tone of bitter and 
worldly cynicism, a belief in fortune as the sole 
providence. As nearly as I could make out, he 
was a Johnson man in American politics ; upon the 
Mexican question he was independent, disdaining 
French and Mexicans alike. He was with the for- 
mer from the first, and had continued in the service 
of Maximilian after their withdrawal, till the execu- 
tion of that prince made Mexico no place for adven- 
turous merit. He was now o;oino; back to his native 
country, an ungrateful land enough, which had ill 
treated him long ago. but to which he nevertheless 
returned in a perfect gayety of temper. What a 
light-hearted rogue he was, — with such merry eyes, 
and su^cli a pleasant smile shaping his neatly trimmed 
beard and mustache ! After he had supped, and he 
stood with us at the door taking leave, something 
happened to be said of Italian songs, whereupon this 
blithe exile, whom the compassion of strangers was 
enabling to go home after many years of unprofitable 



I 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 4£ 

toil and danger to a country that had loved him not, 
fell to caroling a Venetian barcarole, and went 
sweetly away in its cadence. I bore him company 
as far as the gate of another Italian-speaking signor, 
and was there bidden adieu with great effusion, so 
that I forgot till he had left me to charge him not to 
be in fear of the house-dog, which barked but did 
not bite. In calling this after him, I had the mis- 
fortune to blunder in my verb. A man of another 
nation — perhaps another man of his own nation — 
would have cared rather for what I said than how I 
said it ; but he, as if too zealous for the honor of his 
beautiful language to endure a hurt to it even in that 
moment of erief, liftino; his hat, and bowino; for the 
last time, responded with a " Morde, non morsica, 
sign ore ! " and passed in under the pines, and next 
day to Italy. 

There is a little old Genoese lady comes to sell us 
pins, needles, thread, tape, and the like roha, whom 
I regard as leading quite an ideal life in some re- 
spects. Her traffic is limited to a certain number of 
families who speak more or less Italian ; and her 
days, so far as they are concerned, must be passed 
in an atmosphere of sympathy and kindliness. The 
truth is, we Northern and New World folk cannot 
help but cast a little romance about whoever come? 
to us from Italy, whether we have actually known 
the beauty and charm of that land or not. Then 
this old lady is in herself a very gentle and lovable 
kind of person, with a tender mother-face, which is 
also the face of a child. A smile plays always upon 



46 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

her wrinkled visage, and her quick and restless eyes 
are full of friendliness. There is never much stuff 
in her basket, however, and it is something of a mys- 
tery how she manages to live from it. None but an 
Italian could, I am sure ; and her experience must 
test the full virtue of the national genius for cheap 
salads and much-extenuated soup-meat. I do not 
know whether it is native in her, or whether it is a 
grace acquired from long dealing with those kindly- 
liearted customers of hers in Charlesbridge, but she 
is of a most mmiificent spirit, and returns every 
smallest benefit with some present from her basket. 
She makes me ashamed of thino;s I have written 
about the sordidness of her race, but I shall vainly 
seek to atone for them by open-handedness to her. 
She will give favor for favor ; she will not even 
count the money she receives ; our bargaining is a 
contest of the courtliest civilities, ending in many 
an " Adieu ! " " To meet again ! " " Remain well ! " 
and " Finally ! " not surpassed if rivaled in any 
Italian street. In her ineffectual Avay, she brings 
us news of her different customei's, breaking up their 
stout Saxon names into tinkling polysyllables which 
suggest them only to the practiced sense, and is per- 
fectly patient and contented if we mistake one for 
another. She loves them all, but she pities them as 
living in a terrible climate ; and doubtless in her 
heart she purposes one day to go back to Italy, there 
to die. In the mean time she is very cheerful ; she, 
too, has had her troubles, — what troubles I do not 
remember, but those that come by sickness and by 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINT ANCE. 47 

death, and that really seem no sorrows until they 
come to us, — yet she never complains. It is hard 
to make a living, and the house-rent alone is six dol- 
lars a month ; but still one lives, and does not fare 
so ill either. As it does not seem to be in her to 
dislike any one, it must be out of a harmless guile, 
felt to be comforting to servant-ridden householders, 
that she always speaks of " those Irish," her neigh- 
bors, with a bated breath, a shaken head, a hand 
lifted to the cheek, and an averted countenance. 

Swarthiest of the organ-grinding tribe is he who 
peers up at my window out of infinitesimal black 
eyes, perceives me, louts low, and for form's sake 
grinds me out a tune before he begins to talk. As 
Ave parley together, say it is eleven o'clock in the 
forenoon, and a sober tranquillity reigns upon the 
dust and noddino; weeds of Benicia Street. At that 
hour the organ-grinder and I are the only persons 
of our sex in the whole suburban population ; all 
other husbands and fathers having eaten their break- 
fasts at seven o'clock, and stood up in the early 
horse-cars to Boston, whence they will return, with 
aching backs and quivering calves, half-pendant by 
leathern straps from the roofs of the same luxurious 
conveyances, in the evening. The Italian might go 
and grind his organ upon the front stoop of any one 
of a hundred French-roof houses around, and there 
would be no arm within strono- enouMi to thrust him 
thence ; but he is a gentleman in his way, and, as 
he prettily explains, he never stops to play except 
where the window smiles on him : a frowning lattice 



48 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

he will pass in silence. I behold in him a disap-« 
pointed man, — a man broken in health, and of a 
liver baked by long sojourn in a tropical clime. In 
large and dim outline, made all the dimmer by his 
dialect, he sketches me tlie story of his life ; how in 
his youth he ran away from the Milanese for love 
of a girl in France, who, dying, left him with so 
little purpose in the world that, after working at his 
trade of plasterer for some years in Lyons, he lis- 
tened to a certain gentleman going out upon govern- 
ment service to a French colony in South America. 
This gentleman wanted a man-servant, and he said 
to my organ-grinder, " Go with me and I make your 
fortune." So he, who cared not whither he went, 
went, and found himself in the tropics. It was a 
hard life he led there ; and of the wages that had 
seemed so great in France, he paid nearly half to 
his laundress alone, being forced to be neat in his 
master's house. The service was not so irksome 
in-doors, but it was the hunting beasts in the forest 
all day that broke his patience at last. 

" Beasts in the forest ? " I ask, forgetfrJ of the 
familiar sense of bestie, and figuring cougars at least 
by the word. 

" Yes, those little beasts for the natui-alists, — flies, 
bugs, beetles, — Heaven knows what." 

" But this brought you money ? " 

" It brought my master money, but me aches and 
pains as many as you will, and at last the fever. 
When that was burnt out, I made up my mind to 
ask for more pay, and, not getting it, to quit that 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 49 

service. I think the signer would have given it, — 
but the signora ! So I left, empty as I came, and 
was cook on a vessel to Ncav York." 

This was the black and white of the man's story. 
I lose the color and atmosphere which his manner as 
well as his words bestowed upon it. He told it in a 
cheerful, impersonal kind of way as the romance of 
a poor devil which had interested him, and might 
possibly amuse me, leaving out no touch of character 
in his portrait of the fat, selfish master, — yielding 
enough, however, but for his grasping wife, who, 
with all her avarice and greed, he yet confessed to 
be very handsome. By the wave of a hand he 
hoiised them in a tropic residence, dim, cool, close 
shut, kept by servants in white linen moving with 
mute slippered feet over stone floors ; and by another 
gesture he indicated the fierce thorny growths of the 
forest in which he hunted those vivid insects, — the 
luxuriant savannas, the gigantic ferns and palms, 
the hush and shining desolation, the presence of the 
invisible fever and death. There was a touch, too, 
of inexpressible sadness in his half-ignorant mention 
of the exiles at Cayenne, who were forbidden the 
wide ocean of escape about them by those swift gun- 
boats keeping their coasts and swooping down upon 
every craft that left the shore. He himself had seen 
one such capture, and he made me see it, and the 
mortal despair of the fugitives, standing upright in 
their boat with the idle oars in their unconscious 
hands, while the corvette swept toward them. 

For all his misfortunes, he was not cast down. 
4 



50 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

He had that lightness of temper which seems proper 
to most northern Italians, whereas those from the 
south are usually dark-mooded, sad-faced men. 
Nothing -surpasses for unstudied misanthropy of 
expression the visages of different Neapolitan harpers 
who have visited us ; but they have some right to 
their dejected countenances as being of a yet half- 
civilized stock, and as real artists and men of genius. 
Nearly all wandering violinists, as well as harpers, 
are of their race, and they are of every age, from 
that of mere children to men in their prime. They 
are very rarely old, as many of the organ-grinders 
are ; they are not so handsome as the Italians of the 
north, though they have invariably fine eyes. They 
arrive in twos and threes ; the violinist briefly tunes 
his fiddle, and tlie harper unslings his instrument, 
and, with faces of profound gloom, they go through 
their repertory, — pieces from the great composers, 
airs from the opera, not unmingled with such efforts 
of Anglo-Saxon genius as Champagne Charley and 
Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines, which, like the 
language of Shakespeare and Milton, hold us and 
our English cousins in tender bonds of mutual affec- 
tion. Beyond the fact that they come " dal Basili- 
cat'," or " dal Principat','' one gets very little out 
of these Neapolitans, though I dare say they are 
not so surly at heart as they look. Money does not 
brighten them to the eye, but yet it touches them, 
^nd they are good in playing or leaving off to him 
that pays. Long time two of them stood between 
the gateway firs on a pleasant summer's afternoon, 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 51 

and twanged and scraped their harmonious strings, 
till all the idle boys of the neighborhood gathered 
about them, listening with a grave and still delight. 
It was a most serious company : the Neapolitans, 
with their cloudy brows, rapt in their music ; and the 
Yankee children, with their impassive faces, warily 
guarding against the faintest expression of enjoy- 
ment; and when at last the minstrels played a brisk 
measure, and the music began to work in the blood 
of the boys, and one of them shuffling his reluctant 
feet upon the gravel, broke into a sudden and resist- 
less dance, the spectacle became too sad for con- 
templation. The boy danced only from the hips 
down ; no expression of his face gave the levity 
sanction, nor did any of hi^ comrades : they beheld 
him with a silent fascination, but none was infected 
by the solemn indecorum ; and when the legs and 
music ceased their play together, no comment was 
made, and the dancer turned unheated away. A 
chance passer asked for what he called the Geary- 
baldeye Hymn, but the Neapolitans apparently did 
not know what this was. 

My doorstep acquaintance were not all of one race ; 
now and then an alien to the common Italian tribe 
appeared, — an Irish soldier, on his way to Salem, 
and willing to show me more of his mutilation than 
I cared to buy the sight of for twenty-five cents ; 
and more rarely yet an American, also formerly of 
the army, but with something besides his wretched- 
ness to sell. On the hottest day of last summer such 
a one rang the bell, and was discovered on the thresh- 



52 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

old wiping with his poor sole hand the sweat that 
stood upon his forehead. There was still enough of 
the independent citizen in his maimed and emaciated 
person to inspire him with deliberation and a show 
of that indifference with which we Americans like to 
encounter each other ; but his voice was rather faint 
when he asked if I supposed we wanted any starch 
to-day. 

" Yes, certainly," answered what heart there was 
within, taking note willfully, but I hope not wantonly, 
wlxat an absurdly limp figure he Avas for a peddler of 
starch, — "certainly from you, brave fellow;" and 
the package being taken from his basket, the man 
turned to go away, so very wearily, that a cheap phi- 
lanthropy protested : " For shame ! ask him to sit 
down in-doors and drink a glass of water." 

" No," answered the poor fellow, when this indig- 
nant voice had been obeyed, and he had been taken 
at a disadvantage, and as it were surprised into the 
confession, " my family hadn't any breakfast this 
morning, and I've got to hurry back to them." 

" Haven't you had any breakfast ? " 

" Well, I wa'n't rightly hungry when I left the 
house." 

" Here, now," popped in the virtue before named, 
" is an opportunity to discharge the debt we all owe 
to the brave fellows who gave us back our country. 
Make it beer." 

So it was made beer and bread and cold meat, 
and, after a little pressing, the honest soul consented 
to the refreshment. He sat down in a cool doorway, 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 53 

and began to eat and to tell of the fight before 
Vicksburg. And if you have never seen a one- 
armed soldier making a meal, I can assure you the 
sight is a pathetic one, and is rendered none the 
cheerfaller by his memories of the fights that muti- 
lated him. This man had no very susceptible audi- 
ence, but before he was carried off the field, shot 
through the body, and in the arm and foot, he had 
sold every package of starch in his basket. I am 
ashamed to say this now, for I suspect that a man 
with one arm, who indulged liimself in going about 
under that broiling sun of July, peddling starch, was 
very probably an impostor. He computed a good 
day's profits of seventy-five cents, and when asked 
if that was not very little for the support of a sick 
wife and three children, he answered with a quaint 
effort at impressiveness, and with a trick, as I im- 
agined, from the manner of the regimental chaplain, 
" You've done your duty, my friend, and more'n 
your duty. If every one did their duty like that, we 
should get along." So he took leave, and shambled 
out into the furnace-heat, the sun beating upon his 
pale face, and his linen coat hugging him close, but 
with his basket lighter, and I hope his heart also. 
At any rate, this was the sentiment which cheap phi- 
lanthropy offered in self-gratulation, as he passed out 
of sight : " There ! you are quits with those maimed 
soldiers at last, and you have a country which you 
have paid for with cold victvmls as they with blood." 
We have been a good deal visited by one dis- 
banded volunteer, not to the naked eye maimed, nor 



54 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

apparently suffering from any lingering illness, yei 
who bears, as he tells me, a secret disabling wound 
in his side from a spent shell, and who is certainly a 
prey to the most acute form of shiftlessness. I do 
not recall with exactness the date of our acquaint- 
ance, but it was one of those pleasant August after- 
noons when a dinner eaten in peace fills the di- 
gester with a millennial tenderness for the race too 
rarely felt in the nineteenth century. At such a 
moment it is a more natural action to loosen than to 
tighten the purse-strings, and when a very neatly 
dressed young man presented himself at the gate, 
and, in a note of indescribable plaintiveness, asked 
if I had any little job for him to do that he might 
pay for a night's lodging, I looked about the small 
domain with a vague longing to find some part of it 
in disrepair, and experienced a moment's absurd 
relief when he hinted that he would be willing to 
accept fifty cents in pledge of future service. Yet 
this was not the right principle : some work, real or 
apparent, must be done for the money, and the 
veteran was told that he might weed the strawberry 
bed, though, as matters then stood, it was clean 
enough for a strawberry bed that never bore any- 
thing. The veteran was neatly dressed, as I have 
said : his coat, which was good, was buttoned to the 
throat for reasons that shall be sacred against curios- 
ity, and he had on a perfectly clean paper collar ; he 
was a handsome young fellow, with regular features, 
and a solicitously kept imperial and mustache ; his 
hair, when he lifted his hat, appeared elegantly oiled 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 55 

and brushed. I did not hope from this figure that 
the work done would be worth the money paid, and, 
as nearly as I can compute, the weeds he took from 
that bed cost me «, cent apiece, to say nothing of a 
cup of tea given him in grace at the end of his 
labors. 

My acquaintance was, as the reader will be glad 
to learn, a native American, though it is to be re- 
gretted, for the sake of facts which his case went far 
to establish, that he was not a New-Englander by 
birth. The most that could be claimed M'as, that he 
came to Boston from Delaware when very young, 
and that there on that brine-washed granite he had 
grown as perfect a flower of helplessness and indo- 
lence, as fine a fruit of maturing civilization, as ever 
expanded or ripened in Latin lands. He lived, not 
only a protest in flesh and blood against the tendency 
of democracy to exclude mere beauty from our sys- 
tem, but a refutation of those Old World observers, 
who denv to our vulgar and bustlinii communities 
the refining and elevating gi'ace of Repose. There 
was something very curious and original in his 
character, from which the sentiment of shame was 
absent, but which was not lacking in the fine in- 
stincts of personal cleanliness, of dress, of style. 
There was nothing of the rowdy in him ; he was 
gentle as an Italian noble in his manners : what 
other traits they may have had in common, I do not 
know ; perhaps an amiable habit of illusion. He 
was always going to bring me his discharge papers, 
but he never did, though he came often and had 



56 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

many a pleasant night's sleep at my cost. If some- 
times he did a little work, he spent great part of the 
time contracted to me in the kitchen, where it was 
understood, quite upon his own agency, that his 
wages included board. At other times, he called for 
money too late in the evening to work it out that 
day, and it has happened that a new second girl, 
deceived by his genteel appearance in the uncertain 
light, has shown him into the parlor, where I have 
found him to his and my own great amusement, as 
the gentleman who wanted to see me. Nothing else 
seemed to raise his ordinarily dejected spirits so much. 
We all know how pleasant it is to laugh at people be- 
hind their backs ; but this veteran affoi'ded me at a 
very low rate the luxury of a fellow-being whom one 
mi^ht lauo-h at to his face as much as one liked. 

Yet with all his shamelessness, his pensiveness, his 
elegance, I felt that somehow our national triumph 
was not complete in him, — that there were yet more 
finished forms of self-abasement in the Old World, 
till one day I looked out of the window and saw at a 
little distance my veteran digging a cellar for an 
Irishman. I own that the spectacle gave me a shock 
of })leasure, and that I ran down to have a nearer 
view of what human eyes have seldom, if ever, be- 
held, — an American, pure blood, handling the pick, 
the shovel, and the wheelbarrow, while an Irishman 
directed his labors. Upon inspection, it appeared 
that none of the trees grew with their roots in the 
air, in recognition of this great reversal of the 
natural law ; all the French-roof houses stood rio;ht 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 57 

side up. The phenomenon may become more com- 
mon in future, unless the American race accom- 
plishes its destiny of dying out before the more pop- 
ulatory foreigner, but as yet it graced the veteran 
with an exquisite and signal distinction. He, how- 
ever, seemed to feel unpleasantly the anomaly of his 
case, and opened the conversation by saying that he 
should not work at that job to-morrow, it hurt his 
side ; and went on to complain of the inhumanity of 
Americans to Americans. "Why," said he, "they'd 
rather give out their jobs to a nigger than to one of 
their own kind. I was beatin' carpets for a gentle- 
man on the Avenue, and the first thing I know he 
give most of 'em to a nigger. I beat seven of 'em 
in one day, and got two dollars ; and the nigger beat 
'em by the piece, and he got a dollar an' a half 
apiece. My luck ! " 

Here the Irishman glanced at his hireling, and the 
rueful veteran hastened to pile up another wheel- 
barrow with earth. If ever we come to reverse 
positions generally with our Irish brethren, there is 
no doubt but they will get more work out of us than 
we do fi-om them at present. 

It was shortly after this that the veteran offered to 
do second girl's work in my house if I Avould take 
him. The place was not vacant ; and as the sum- 
mer was now drawing to a close, and I feared to be 
left with him on my hands for the winter, it seemed 
well to speak to him upon the subject of economy. 
The next time he called, I had not about me the 
exact sum for a night's lodging, — fifty cents, namelv, 



58 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

— and asked him if he thought a dollar would do 
He smiled sadly, as if he did not like jesting upon 
such a very serious subject, but said he allowed to 
work it out, and took it. 

" Now, I hope you won't think I am interfering 
with your affairs," said his benefactor, " but I really 
think you are a very poor financier. According to 
your own account, you have been going on from 
year to year for a long time, trusting to luck for a 
night's lodging. Sometimes I suppose you have to 
sleep out-of-doors." 

" No, never ! " answered the veteran, Avith some- 
thing like scorn. " I never sleep out-doors. I 
wouldn't do it." 

" Well, at any rate, some one has to pay for your 
lodging. Don't you think you'd come cheaper to 
your friends, if, instead of going to a hotel every 
night, you'd take a room somewhere, and pay for it 
by the month? " 

" I've thought of that. If I could get a good bed, 
I'd try it awhile anyhow. You see the hotels have 
raised. I used to get a lodgin' and a nice breakfast 
for a half a dollar, but now it is as much as you can 
do to get a lodgin' for the money, and it's just as 
dear in the Port as it is in the city. I've tried hotels 
pretty much everywhere, and one's about as bad as 
another." 

If he had been a travelled Englishman writing a 
book, he could not have spoken of hotels with greater 
disdain. 

" You see, the trouble with me is, I ain't got any 



DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 59 

relations around here. Now," he added, with the 
life and eagerness of an inspiration, " if I had a 
mother and sister Hvin' down at the Port, say, I 
wouldn't go hunting about for these mean little jobs 
everywheres. I'd just lay round home, and wait till 
something come up big. What I want is a home." 

At the instigation of a malignant spirit I asked 
the homeless orphan, " Why don't you get married, 
then?" 

He gave me another smile, sadder, fainter, sweeter 
than before, and said : " When would you like to see 
me again, so I could work out this dollar? " 

A sudden and unreasonable disg-ust for the charac- 
ter which had given me so much entertainment suc- 
ceeded to my past delight. I felt, moreover, that I 
had bought the rio-ht to use some frankness with the 
veteran, and I said to him : " Do you know now, I 
shouldn't care if I never saw you again ? " 

I can only conjecture that he took the confidence 
in good part, for he did not appear again after that. 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 

Walking for walking's sake I do not like. The 
diversion appears to me one of the most factitious 
of modern enjoyments ; and I cannot help looking 
ujDon those who pace their five miles in the teeth of 
a north wind, and profess to come home all the live- 
lier and better for it, as guilty of a venial hypocrisy. 
It is in nature that after such an exercise the bones 
should ache and the flesh tremble ; and I suspect 
that these harmless pretenders are all the while pay- 
ing a secret penalty for their bravado. With a 
pleasant end in view, or with cheerful companion- 
ship, walking is far from being the worst thing in 
life ; though doubtless a truly candid person must 
confess that he would rather ride under the same 
circumstances. Yet it is certain that some sort of 
.recreation is necessary after a day spent within doors ; 
and one is really obliged nowadays to take a little 
walk instead of medicine ; for one's doctor is sure to 
have a mania on the subject, and there is no more 
getting pills or powders out of him for a slight indi- 
gestion than if they had all • been shot away at the 
rebels during the war. For this reason I sometimes 
go upon a pedestrian tour, which is of no great ex- 
tent in itself, and which I moi-eover modify by keep- 
ing always within sound of the horse-car bells, or 
easy reach of some steam-car station. 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 61 

I fear that I should find these rambles dull, but 
that their utter lack of interest amuses me. I will 
be honest with the reader, though, and any Master 
Pliable is fi'ee to forsake me at this point ; for I 
cannot promise to be really livelier than my walk. 
There is a Slough of Despond in full view, and not 
a Delectable Mountain to be seen, unless you choose 
so to call the high lands about Waltham, which we 
shall behold dark blue against the western sky pres- 
ently. As I sally forth upon Benicia Street, the 
whole suburb of Charlesbridge stretches about me, 
— a vast space upon which I can embroider any 
fancy I like as I saunter along. I have no associa- 
tions with it, or memories of it, and, at some seasons, 
I might wander for days in the most frequented parts 
of it, and meet hardly any one I know. It is not, 
however, to these parts that I commonly turn, but 
northward, up a street upon which a flight of French- 
roof houses suddenly settled a year or two since, with 
families in them, and many outward signs of per- 
manence, though their precipitate arrival might cast 
some doubt upon this. I have to admire their uni- 
form neatness and prettiness, and I look at their 
dormer-windows with the envy of one to whose 
weak' sentimentality dormer-windows long appeared 
the supreme architectural happiness. But, for all 
my admiration of the houses, I find a variety that is 
pleasanter in the landscape, when I reach, beyond 
them, a little bridge which appears to span a small 
stream. It unites banks lined with a growth of trees 
and briers nodding their heads above the neiMiborino- 



62 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

levels, and suggesting a quiet water-course ; though 
in fact it is the Fitchburg Railroad that purls be- 
tween them, with rippling freight and passenger 
trains and ever-gurgling locomotives. The banks 
take the earliest green of spring upon their south- 
ward slope, and on a Sunday morning of May, when 
the bells are lamenting the Sabbaths of the past, I 
find their sunny tranquillity sufficient to give me a 
slight heart-ache for I know not what. If I descend 
them and follow the railroad westward half a mile, I 
come to vast brick-yards, which are not in them- 
selves exciting to the imagination, and which yet, 
from an irresistible association of ideas, remind me 
of Egypt, and are forever newly forsaken of those 
who made bricks without straw ; so that I have no " 
trouble in erecting temples and dynastic tombs out 
of the kilns ; while the mills for grinding the clay 
serve me very well for those sad-voiced sakias or 
wheel-pumps which the Howadji Curtis heard wail- 
inor at their work of drawino; water from the Nile. 
A little farther on I come to the boarding-house 
built at the railroad side for the French Canadians 
who have by this time succeeded the Hebrews in 
the toil of the brick-yards, and who, as they loiter in 
windy-voiced, good-humored groups about the doors 
of their lodgings, insist upon bringing before me the 
town of St. Michel at the mouth of the great Mont 
Cenis tunnel, where so many peasant folk like them 
are always amiably quarreling before the cabarets 
when the diligence comes and goes. Somewhere, 
there must be a gendarme with a cocked hat and a 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 63 

sword on, standing with folded arms to represent the 
Empire and Peace amono; that rural population ; if I 
looked in-doors, I am sui'e 1 should see the neatest 
of landladies and landladies' daughters and nieces in 
high black silk caps, bearing hither and thither 
smoking bowls of bouillon and cafe-au-lait. Well, it 
takes as little to make one happy as miserable, thank 
Heaven ! and I derive a cheerfulness from this scene 
which quite atones to me for the fleeting desolation 
suffered from the sunny verdure on the railroad 
bank. With repaired spirits I take my way up 
through the brick-yards towards the Irish settlement 
on the north, passing under the long sheds that sliel- 
ter the kilns. The ashes lie cold about the mouths 
of most, and the bricks are burnt to the proper com- 
plexion ; in others these are freshly arranged over 
flues in Avhich the fire has not been kindled ; but in 
whatever state I see them, I am reminded of brick- 
kilns of boyhood. They were then such palaces of 
enchantment as any architect should now vainly at- 
tempt to rival with bricks upon the most desirable 
corner lot of the Back Bay, and were the homes of 
men truly to be envied : men privileged to stay up all 
night ; to sleep, as it were, out of doors ; to hear the 
wild geese as they flew over in the darkness ; to be 
waking in time to shoot the early ducks that visited 
the neighboring ponds ; to roast corn upon the ends 
of sticks ; to tell and to listen to stories that never 
ended, save in some sudden impulse to rise and dance 
a happy hoe-down in the ruddy light of the kiln-fires. 
If by day they were seen to have the redness of 



64 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

eyes of men that looked upon the whiskey when it 
was yellow and gave its color in the flask ; if now 
and then the fragments of a broken bottle strewed 
the scene of their vigils, and a head broken to match 
appeared among those good comrades, the boyish 
imagination was not shocked by these things, but 
accepted them merely as the symbols of a free virile 
life. Some such life no doubt is still to be found in 
the Dublin to which I am come by the time my re- 
pertory of associations with brick-kilns is exhausted ; 
but, oddly enough, I no longer care to encounter it. 

It is perhaps in a pious recognition of our mortality 
that Dublin is built around the Irish grave-yard. 
Most of its windows look out upon the sepulchral 
monuments and the pretty constant arrival of the 
funeral trains with their long- lines of carriages 
bringino; to the celebration of the sad ultimate rites 
those gay companies of Irish mourners. I suppose 
that the spectacle of such obsequies is not at all de- 
pressing to the inhabitants of Dublin ; but that, on 
the contrary, it must beget in them a feeling which, 
if not resignation to death, is, at least, a sort of sub- 
acute cheerfulness in his presence. None but a 
Dubliner, however, would have been greatly ani- 
mated by a scene which I witnessed during a stroll 
through this cemetery one afternoon of early spring. 
The fact that a marble slab or shaft more or less 
sculptured, and inscribed with words more or less 
.helpless, is the utmost that we can give to one whom 
once we could caress with every tenderness of speech 
and touch ; and that, after all, the memorial we raise 




Lcicjkiiii;- ab<nit, I saw two women." See page G5. 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 65 

IS rather to our own grief, and is a decency, a mere 
conventionality, — this is a dreadful fact on which 
the heart breaks itself with such a pang, that it al- 
ways seems a desolation never recognized, an anguish 
never felt before. Whilst I stood revolving this 
thought in my mind, and reading the Irish names 
upon the stones and the black head-boards, — the 
tatter adorned with pictures of angels, once gilt, but 
now weather-worn down to the yellow paint, — a 
wail of intolerable pathos filled the air : " O my 
darling, O my darling ! O — O — O ! " with sobs 
and groans and sighs ; and, looking about, I saw two 
women, one standing upright beside another that had 
cast herself upon a grave, and lay clasping it with 
her comfortless arms, uttering these cries. The 
grave was a year old at least, but the gi'ief seemed 
of yesterday or of that morning. At times the 
friend that stood beside the prostrate woman stooped 
and spoke a soothing word to her, while she wailed 
out her woe ; and in the midst some little ribald 
Irish boys came scuffling and quarreling up the 
pathway, singing snatches of an obscene song ; and 
when both the wailing and the singino; had died 
away, an old woman, decently clad, and with her 
many-wrinkled face softened by the old-fashioned fi-ill 
running round the inside of her cap, dropped down 
upon her knees beside a very old grave, and clasped 
her hands in a silent prayer above it. 

If I had beheld all this in some village campo santo. 
in Italy, I should have been much more vividly im- 
pressed by it, as an aesthetical observer ; whereas I 



6Q SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

was now merely touched as a human being, and had 
Httle desire to turn the scene to hterarj account. I 
could not help feeling that it wanted the atmosphei'e 
of sentimental association ; the whole background 
was a blank or worse than a blank. Yet I have not 
been able to hide from myself so much as I would 
like certain points of resemblance between our Irish 
and the poorer classes of Italians. The likeness is 
one of the first things that strikes an American in 
Italy, and I am always reminded of it in Dublin. 
So much of the local life appears upon the street ; 
there is so much gossip from house to house, and the 
talk is always such a resonant clamoring; the women, 
bareheaded, or with a shawl folded over the head 
and causht beneath the chin with the hand, have 
such a contented down-at-heel aspect, shuffling from 
door to door, or lounging, arms akimbo, among the 
cats and poultry at their own thresholds, that one 
beholding it all might well fancy himself upon some 
Italian calle or vicolo. Of course the illusion does 
not hold good on a Sunday, when the Dubliners are 
coming home from church in their best, — their ex- 
traordinary best bonnets and their prodigious silk 
hats. It does not hold good in any way or at any 
time, except upon the surface, for there is beneath 
all this resemblance the difference that must exist 
between a race inimemorially civilized and one which 
has lately emerged from barbarism " after six cen- 
turies of oppression." You are likely to find a 
polite pagan under the mask of the modern Italian ; 
you feel pretty sure that any of his race would, 



A PEDESTEIAN TOUR. 67 

with a little washing and skillful manipulation, restore^ 
like a neglected painting, into something genuinely 
graceful and pleasing ; but if one of these Yankee- 
fied Celts were scraped, it is but too possible that 
•you might find a kern, a Whiteboy, or a Pikeman. 
The chance of discovering a scholar or a saint of the 
period when Ireland was the centre of learning, and 
the favorite seat of the Church, is scarcely one in 
three. 

Amoncr the houses fronting on the main street of 
Dublin, every other one — I speak in all moderation 
— is a grocery, if I may judge by a tin case of corn- 
balls, a jar of candy, and a card of shirt-buttons, 
with an under layer of primers and ballads, in the 
windows. You descend from the street by several 
steps into these haunts, which are contrived to secure 
the greatest possible dampness and darkness ; and if 
you have made an errand inside, you doubtless find 
a lady before the counter in the act of putting down 
a guilty-looking tumbler with one hand, while she 
neatly wipes her mouth on the back of the other. 
She has that effect, observable in all tippling women 
of low degree, of having no upper garment on but 
a shawl, which hangs about her in statuesque folds 
and lines. She slinks out directly, but the lady be- 
hind the counter gives you good evening with 

" The affectation of a bright-eyed ease," 

intended to deceive if you chance to be a State con- 
stable in disguise, and to propitiate if you are a veri- 
table customer: " Who was that woman, lamenting 



68 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

SO, over in the grave-yard? " " O, I don't know, sir," 
answered the lady, making change for the price of a 
ballad. " Some Irish folks. They ginerally cries 
that way." 

In yet earlier spring walks through Dublin, I 
found a depth of mud appalling even to one who 
had lived three years in Charlesbridge. The 
streets were passable only to pedestrians skilled in 
shifting themselves along the sides of fences and 
alert to take advantage of every projecting doorstep. 
There were no dry places, except in front of the 
groceries, where the ground was beaten hard by the 
broad feet of loafing geese and the coming and go- 
ing of admirably small children making purchases 
there. The number of the little ones was quite as 
remarkable as their size, and ought to have been 
even more interesting, if, as sometimes appears prob- 
able, such increase shall — together with the well- 
known ambition of Dubliners to rule the land — one 
day make an end of us poor Yankees as a dominant 
plurality. 

The town was somewhat tainted Avith our archi- 
tectural respectability, unless the newness of some 
of the buildings gave illusion of this ; and, though 
the streets of Dublin were not at all cared for, and 
thovigh every house on the main thoroughfare stood 
upon the brink of a slough, without yard, or any 
attempt at garden or shrubbery, there were many 
cottages in the less aristoci-atic quarters inclosed in 
palings, and embowered in the usual suburban pear- 
trees and currant-bushes. These, indeed, were 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. S9 

dwellings of an elder sort, and had clearly been 
inherited from a population now as extinct in that 
region as the Pequots, and they were not always 
carefully cherished. On the border of the hamlet is 
to be seen an old farm-house of the poorer sort, built 
about the beginning of this century, and now thickly 
peopled by Dubliners. Its gate is thrown down, and 
the great wild-grown lilac hedge, no longer protected 
by a fence, shows skirts bedabbled by the familiarity 
of lawless poultry, as little like the steady-habited 
poultry of other times, as the people of the house 
are like the former inmates, long since dead or gone 
West. I offer the poor place a sentiment of regret 
as I pass, thinking of its better days. I think of its 
decorous, hard-working, cleanly, school-going, church- 
attending life, which was full of the pleasure of duty 
done, and was not without its own quaint beauty 
and grace. What long Sabbaths were kept in that 
old house, what scanty holidays ! Yet from this and 
such as this came the dominion of the whole wild 
continent, the freedom of a race, the greatness of 
the greatest people. It may be that I regretted a 
little too exultantly, and that out of this particular 
house came only peddling of innumerable clocks 
and multitudinous tin-ware. But as yet, it is pretty 
certain that the general character of the population 
has not gained by the change. What is in the 
future, let the prophets say ; any one can see that 
something not quite agreeable is in the present; 
something that takes the wrong side, as by instinct, 
m politics ; something that mainly helps to prop up 



70 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

tottering priestcraft among us ; somethino; that one 
thinks of witli dismay as destined to control so 
largely the civil and religious interests of the coun- 
try. This, however, is only the aggregate aspect. 
Mrs. Clannahan's kitchen, as it may be seen by the 
desperate philosopher wlien he goes to engage hei' 
for the spring house-cleaning, is a strong argument 
against his fears. If Mrs. Clannahan, lately of an 
Irish cabin, can show a kitchen so capably appointed 
and so neatly kept as that, the country may jet 
be an inch or two from the brink of ruin, and the 
race which we trust as little as we love may turn out 
no more spendthrift than most heirs. It is encour- 
aging, moreover, when any people can flatter them- 
selves upon a superior prosperity and virtue, and we 
may take heart from the fact that the French Cana- 
dians, many of M'hom have lodgings in Dublin, are 
not well seen by the higher classes of the citizens 
there. Mrs. Clannahan, whose house stands over 
against the main gate of the grave-yard, and who- 
may, therefore, be considered as moving in the best 
Dublin society, hints, that though good Catholics, the 
French are not thought perfectly honest, — " things 
have beeft missed " since they came to blight with 
their crimes and vices the once happy seat of integ- 
rity. It is amusing to find Dublin fearful of the en- 
croachment of the French, as we, in our turn, dread 
the advance of the Irish. We must make a jest of 
our own alarms, and even smile — since we cannot 
help ourselves — at the spiritual desolation occasioned 
by the settlement of an Irish family in one of our 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 71 

suburban neighborhoods. The householders view 
with fear and jealousy the erection of any dwelling 
of less than a stated cost, as portending a possible 
advent of Irish ; and when the calamitous race 
actually appears, a mortal pang strikes to the bottom 
of every pocket. Values tremble throughout that 
neighborhood, to which the new-comers communicate 
a species of moral dry-rot. None but the Irish will 
build near the Irish ; and the infection of fear spreads 
to the elder Yankee homes about, and the owners 
prepare to abandon them, — not always, however, 
let us hope, without turning, at the expense of the 
invaders, a Parthian penny in their flight. In my 
walk from Dublin to North Charlesbridge, I saw 
more than one token of the encroachment of the 
Celtic army, Avhich had here and there invested a 
Yankee house with besieging shanties on every side, 
and thus given to its essential and otherwise quite 
hopeless ugliness a touch of the poetry that attends 
failing fortunes, and hallows decayed gentility of 
however poor a sort originally. The fortunes of 
such a house are, of course, not to be retrieved. 
Where the Celt sets his foot, there the Yankee (and 
it is perhaps wholesome if not agreeable to know 
that the Irish citizen whom we do not always honor 
as our equal in civilization loves to speak of us scorn- 
fully as Yankees) rarely, if ever, returns. The 
place remains to the intruder and his heirs forever.. 
We gracefully retire before him even in politics, as 
the metropolis — if it is the metropolis — can wit- 
ness ; and we wait with an anxious curiosity the 



72 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

encounter of the Irish and the Chinese, now rapidly 
approaching each other from opposite shores of the 
continent. Shall we be crushed in the collision of 
these superior races ? Every intelligence-office will 
soon be ringing with the cries of combat, and all our 
kitchens strewn with pig-tails and bark chignons. 
As yet we have gay hopes of our Buddhistic breth- 
ren ; but how will it be when they begin to quarter 
the Dragon upon the Stars and Stripes, and buy up 
all the best sites for temples, and burn their joss- 
sticks, as it were, under our very noses ? Our grasp 
upon the great problem grows a little lax, perhaps ? 
Is it true that, when we look so anxiously for help 
from others, the virtue has gone out of ourselves ? 
I should hope not. 

As I leave Dublin, the houses grow larger and 
handsomer ; and as I draw near the Avenue, the 
Mansard-roofs look down upon me with their dor- 
mer-windows, and welcome me back to the Ameri- 
can community. There are fences about all the 
houses, inclosing ampler and ampler dooryards ; the 
children, which had swarmed in the thriftless and 
unenlightened purlieus of Dublin, diminish in number 
and finally disappear ; the chickens have vanished ; 
and I hear — I hear the pensive music of the horse- 
car bells, which in some alien land, I am sure, would 
be as pathetic to me as the Ranz des Vaches to the 
Swiss or the bagpipes to the Highlander : in the 
desert, where the traveller seems to hear the famil- 
iar bells of his far-off church, this tinkle would hauni 
the absolute silence, and recall the exile's fancy tc 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 73 

Charlesbridge ; and perhaps in the mocking mirage 
he would behold an airy horse -car track, and a 
phantasmagoric horse-car moving slowly along the 
edge of the horizon, with spectral passengers closeh 
packed inside and overflowing either platform. 

But before I reach the Avenue, Dublin calls to 
me yet again, in the figure of an old, old man, wear- 
ing the clothes of other times, and a sort of ancestral 
round hat. In the act of striking a match he asks 
me the time of day, and, applying the tire to his 
pipe, he returns me his thanks in a volume of words 
and smoke. What a wrinkled and unshorn old man ! 
Can age and neglect do so much for any of us? This 
ruinous person was associated with a hand-cart as 
decrepit as himself, but not nearly so cheerful ; for 
though he spoke up briskly with a spirit uttered from 
far within the wrinkles and the stubble, the cart had 
preceded him with a very lugubrious creak. It 
groaned, in fact, under a load of tin cans, and I was 
to learn from the old man that there was, and had 
been, in his person, for thirteen years, such a thing 
in the world as a peddler of buttermilk, and that 
these cans were now filled with that pleasant drink. 
They did not invite me to prove their contents, being 
cans that apparently passed their vacant moments in 
stables and even manure-heaps, and that looked 
somehow emulous of that old man's stubble and 
wrinkles. I bought nothing,- but I left the old ped- 
dler well content, seated upon a thill of his cart, 
smoking tranquilly, and filling the keen spring even- 
ing air with fumes which it dispersed abroad, and 
made to itself a pleasant incense of. 



74 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

I left him a whole epoch behind, as I entered the 
Avenue and lounged homeward along the stately 
street. Above the station it is far more picturesque 
than it is below, and the magnificent elms that 
shadow it might well have looked, in theu* sapling- 
hood, upon the British straggling down the country- 
road from the Concord fight ; and there are some 
ancient houses yet standing that must have been 
filled with exultation at the same spectacle. Poor 
old revolutionaries ! they would never have believed 
that their descendants would come to love the Eno;- 
lish as we do. 

The season has advanced rapidly during my prog- 
ress from Dublin to the Avenue ; and by the time I 
reach tlie famous old tavern, not far from the station, 
it is a Sunday morning of early summer, and the 
yellow sunlight falls upon a body of good comrades 
who are grooming a marvelous number of piebald 
steeds about the stable-doors. By token of these 
beasts — which always look so much more like works 
of art than of nature — I know that there is to be a 
circus somewhere very soon ; and the gay bills pasted 
all over the stable-front tell me that there are to be 
two performances at the Port on the morrow. The 
grooms talk nothing and joke nothing but horse at 
their labor ; and their life seems such a low, igno- 
rant, happy life, that the secret nomad lurking in 
every respectable and stationary personaHty stirs 
within me and struggles to strike hands of fellowsliip 
with them. They lead a sort of pastoral existence 
in our age of railroads ; they wander over the con- 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 75 

tlnent with their great caravan, and everywhere 
pursue the summer from South to North and from 
North to South again ; in the mild forenoons they 
groom their herds, and in the afternoons they doze 
under their wagons, indifferent to the tumult of the 
crowd within and without the mighty canvas near 
them, — doze face downwards on the bruised, sweet- 
smelUng gi-ass ; and in the starry midnight rise and 
strike their tents, and set forth again over the still 
country roads, to take the next village on the mor- 
row with the blaze and splendor of their " Grand 
Entree." The triumphal chariot in which the musi- 
cians are borne at the head of the procession is com- 
posed, as I perceive by the bills, of four colossal gilt 
swans, set tail to tail, with lifted wings and cuiwing 
necks ; but the chariot, as I behold it beside the sta- 
ble, is mysteriously draped in white canvas, through 
which its gilding glitters only here and there. And 
does it move thus shrouded in the company's wander 
ings from place to place, and is the precious spottiness 
of the piebalds then hidden under envious drapery ? 
O happy grooms, — not clean as to shirts, nor espe- 
cially neat in your conversation, but displaying a 
Wealth of art in India-ink upon your manly chests 
and the swelling muscles of your arms, and speaking 
in every movement your freedom from all conven- 
tional gyves and shackles, '•'• seid umschlungen ! '''' — 
in spirit ; for the rest, you are rathSr too damn, and 
seem to have applied your sudsy sponges too impar- 
tially to your own trousers and the horses' legs to 
receive an actual embrace from a dilettante vaga- 
bond. 



76 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

The old tavern is old only comparatively ; but in 
our new and changeful life it is already quaint. It 
is very long, and low-studded in either story, with a 
row of windows in the roof, and a great porch, fui'- 
nished with benches, running the whole length of 
the ground-floor. Perhaps because they take the 
dust of the street too freely, or because the guests 
find it more social and comfortable to gather in-doors 
in the wide, low-ceiled office, the benches are not 
worn, nor particularly whittled. The room has the 
desolate air characteristic of offices which have once 
been bar-rooms ; but no doubt, on a winter's night, 
there is talk worth listening to there, of flocks and 
herds and horse-trades, from the drovers and cattle- 
market men who patronize the tavern ; and the 
artistic temperament, at least, could feel no regret if 
that sepulchrally penitent bar-room then developed 
a secret capacity for the wickedness that once boldly 
glittered behind the counter in rOws of decanters. 

The house was formerly renowned for its suppers, 
of which all that was learned or gifted in the old 
college town of Charlesbridge used to partake ; and 
I have heard lips which breathe the loftiest song and 
the sweetest humor — let alone being " dewy with 
the Greek of Plato " — smacked regretfully over 
the memory of those suppers' roast and broiled. No 
such suppers, they say, are cooked in the world any 
more ; and I am somehow made to feel that their 
passing away is connected with the decay of good 
literature. 

I hope it may be very long before the predestined 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 77 

French-roof villa occupies the tavern's site, and turns 
into lawns and gardens its wide-spreading cattle-pens, 
and removes the great barn that now shows its broad, 
low gable to the street. This is yet older and 
quainter-looking than the tavern itself ; it is mighty 
capacious, and gives a still profounder impression of 
vastness with its shed, of which the roof slopes 
southward down almost to a man's height fi'om the 
ground, and shelters a row of mangers, running 
back half the length of the stable, and serving in 
former times for the baiting of such beasts as could 
not be provided for within. But the halcyon days 
of the cattle-market are past (though you may still 
see the white horns tossing above the fences of the 
pens, when a newly arrived herd lands from the train 
to be driven afoot to Brighton), and the place looks 
now so empty and forsaken, spite of the circus bag- 
gage-wagons, that it were hard to believe these 
mangers could ever have been in request, but for 
the fact that they are all gnawed, down to the quick 
as it were, by generations of horses — vanished for- 
ever on the deserted highways of the past — impa- 
tient for their oats or hungering for more. 

The day must come, of course, when the mangers 
will all be taken from the stable-shed, and exposed 
for sale at that wonderful second-hand shop which 
stands over against the tavern. I am no more sur- 
prised than one in a dream, to find it a week-day 
afternoon by the time I have crossed thither from 
the cu'cus-men grooming their piebalds. It is an 
enchanted place to me, and I am a fi-equent and 



78 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

unprofitable customer there, buying only just enough 
to make good my footing with the custodian of its 
marvels, who is, of course, too true an American to 
show any desire to sell. Without, on either side of 
the doorway, I am pretty sure to find, among other 
articles of furniture, a mahogany and hair-cloth sofa, 
a family portrait, a landscape painting, a bath-tub, 
and a flower-stand, with now and then the variety 
of a boat^and a dog-house ; while under an adjoin- 
ing shed is heaped a mass of miscellaneous mov- 
ables, of a heavier sort, and fearlessly left there night 
and dav, being; on all accounts undesirable to steal. 
The door of the shop rings a bell in opening, and 
ushers the customer into a room which Chaos her- 
self might have planned in one of her happier mo- 
ments. Carpets, blankets, shawls, pictures, mirrors, 
rockino;-chairs, and blue overalls hang- from the ceil- 
ing, and devious pathways wind amidst piles of ready- 
made clothing, show-cases filled with every sort of 
knick-knack and half hidden under heaps of hats 
and boots and shoes, bookcases, secretaries, chests of 
drawers, mattresses, lounges, and bedsteads, to the 
stairway of a loft similarly appointed, and to a back 
room overflowing with glassware and crockery. 
These things are not all second-hand, but they are 
all old and equally pathetic. The melancholy of 
ruinous auction sales, of chano-ing; tastes or changincj 
fashions, clings to them, Avhether they are things that 
have never had a home and have been on sale ever 
since they were made, or things that have been asso« 
ciated with every phase of human life. 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 79 

Among other objects, certain large glass vases, 
ornamented by the polite art of potichomanie, have 
long appealed to my fancy, wherein they capriciously 
allied themselves to the history of aging single 
women in lonely New England village houses, — 
pathetic sisters lingering upon the neutral ground 
between the faded hopes of marriage and the yet 
unrisen prospects of consumption. The work implies 
an imperfect yet real love of beauty, the leisure for 
it a degree of pecuniary ease : the thoughts of the 
sisters rise above the pickling and preserving that 
occupied their heartier and happier mother; they are 
in fact in that aesthetic, social, and intellectual mean, 
in which sinfjle Avomen are thought soonest to wither 
and decline. With a little more power, and in our 
later era, they would be writing stories full of ambi- 
tious, unintelligible, self-devoted and sudden collaps- 
ing young girls and amazing doctors ; but as they 
are, and in their time, they must do what they can. 
A sentimentalist may discern on these vases not only 
the gay designs with which they oi'namented them, 
but their own dim faces looking wan from the win- 
dows of some huge old homestead, a world too wide 
for the shrunken family. All April long the door- 
yard trees crouch and shudder in the sour east, all 
June they rain canker-worms upon the roof, and 
then in autumn choke the eaves with a fall of tat- 
tered and hectic foliage. From the window the 
fading sisters gaze upon the unnatural liveliness of 
the summer streets through which the summer 
boarders are di-iving, or upon the death-white drifts 



80 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

of the intolerable winter. Their father, the captain, 
is dead ; he died with the Calcutta trade, having sur- 
vived their mother, and left them a hopeless compe- 
tency and yonder bamboo chairs ; their only brother 
is in California ; one, though she loved, had never 
a lover ; her sister's betrothed married West, whither 
he went to make a home for her, — and ah ! is it 
vases for the desolate parlor mantel they decorate, or 
funeral urns ? And when in time, they being gone, 
the Californian brother sends to sell out at auction 
the old place with the household and kitchen furni- 
ture, is it withered rose-leaves or ashes that the pur- 
chaser finds in these jars ? 

They are empty now ; and I wonder how came they 
here ? How came the show-case of Dr. Merrifield, 
Surgeon-Chu'opodist here? How came here yon 
Italian painting ? — a poor, silly, little affected Ma- 
donna, simpering at me from her dingy gilt frame 
till I buy her, a great bargain, at a dollar. From 
what country church or family oratory, in what revo- 
lution, or stress of private fortunes, — then from what 
various cabinets of antiquities, in what dear Vicenza, 
or Ferrara, or Mantua, camest thou, O Madonna? 
Whose likeness are you, poor girl, with your every- 
day prettiness of brows and chin, and your Raphael- 
esque crick in the neck ? I think I know a part of 
your stoiy. You were once the property of that 
ruined advocate, whose sensibilities would sometimes 
consent that a valet de place of uncommon delicacy 
should bring to his ancestral palace some singularly 
meritorious foreigner desirous of purchasing from his 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 81 

rare collection, — a collection of rubbish scarcely to be 
equaled elsewhere in Italy. You hung in that fam- 
ily-room, reached after passage through stately vesti- 
bules and .grand stairways ; and O, I would be 
cheated to the bone, if only I might look out again 
from some such windows as were there, upon some 
such damp, mouldy, broken-statued, ruinous, en- 
chanted garden as lay below ! In that room sat the 
advocate's mother and hunchback sister, with their 
smoky sealdini and their snuffy priest ; and there 
the wife of the foreigner, self-elected the taste of his 
party, inflicted the pang courted by the advocate, 
and asked if you were for sale. And then the ruined 
advocate clasped his hands, rubbed them, set his head 
heart-brokenly on one side, took you down, heaved 
a sigh, shrugged his shoulders, and sold you — you! 
a family heirloom ! Well, at least you are old, and 
you represent to me acres of dim, religious canvas in 
that beloved land ; and here is the dollar now asked 
for you : I could not have bought you for so little at 
home. 

The Madonna is neighbored by several paintings, 
of the kind call^ Grecian for a reason never re- 
vealed by the inventor of an art as old as poticho- 
manie itself. It was an art by which ordinary litho- 
graphs were given a ghastly transparency, and a tone 
as disagreeable as chromos ; and I doubt if it could 
have been known to the Greeks in their best ase. 
But I remember very well when it passed over 
whole neighborhoods in some parts of this country, 
wasting the time of many young women, and disfig- 



82 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

uring parlor walls with the fruit of their accomplish- 
ment. It was always taught by Professors, a class 
of learned young men who acquired their title by 
abandoning the plough and anvil, and, in a suit of 
ready-made clothing, travelling about the country 
with portfolios under their arms. It was an experi- 
ence to make loafers for life of them ; and I fancy 
the girls who learnt their art never afterwards made 
so good butter and cheese. 

" Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa." 

Besides the Grecian paintings there are some mez- 
zotints ; full length pictures of presidents and states- 
men, chiefly General Jackson, Henry Clay, and 
Daniel Webster, which have hung their day in the 
offices or parlors of country politicians. They are all 
statesmanlike and presidential in attitude ; and I 
know that if the mighty Webster's lips had language, 
he would take his hand out of his waistcoat front, 
and say to his fellow mezzotints : " Venerable men ! 
you have come down, to us from a former generation, 
bringing your household furniture and miscellaneous 
trumpery of all kinds with you." 

Some old-fashioned entry lanterns divide my inter- 
est with certain old willow chairs of an hour-glass pat- 
tern, which never stood upright, probably, and have 
now all a confirmed droop to one side, as from having 
been fallen heavily asleep in, upon breezy porches, of 
hot summer .afternoons. In the windows are small 
vases of alabaster, fly-specked Parian and plaster fig- 
ures, and dolls with stiff wooden limbs and papier- 
mache heads, a sort of dolls no longer to be bought 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 83 

in these days of modish, blue-eyed blondes of biscuit 
and sturdy india-rubber brunettes. The show-case 
is full of an incredi})le variety, as photograpli albums, 
fishing-hooks, socks, suspenders, steel pens, cutlery 
of all sorts, and curious old colored prints of Ade- 
laide, and Kate, and Ellen. A rocking-horse is sta- 
bled near amid pendent lengths of second-hand car- 
peting, hat-racks, and mirrors ; and standing cheek- 
by-jowl with painted washstands and bureaus are 
some plaster statues, aptly colored and varnished to 
represent bronze. 

There is nothing here but has a marked character 
of its own, some distinct yet intangible trait ac- 
quired from former circumstances ; and doubtless all 
these things have that lurkino; likeness to former 
owners which clothes and furniture are apt to take 
on from long association, and which we should in- 
stantly recognize could they be confronted with 
their late proprietors. It seems, in very imaginative 
moments, as if the strano-e assemblage of incongrui- 
ties must have a consciousness of these latent resem- 
blances, which the individual pieces betray when 
their present keeper turns the key upon them, and 
abandons them to themselves at night ; and I have 
sometimes fancied such an effect in the late twilight, 
when I have wandered into their resting-place, and 
have beheld them in the unnatural glare of a kerosene 
lamp burning before a brightly polished reflector, and 
casting every manner of grotesque shadow upon the 
floor and walls. But this may have been an illusion ; 
at any rate I am satisfied that the bargain-driving 



84 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

capacity of the storekeeper is not in the least affected 
by a weird quahty in his wares ; though they have 
not failed to impart to him something of their own 
desultory character. He sometimes leaves a neigh- 
bor in charge when he goes to meals, and then, if I 
enter, I am watchfully followed about from corner to 
corner, and from room to room, lest I pocket a mat- 
tress or slip a book-case under my coat. The store- 
keeper himself never watches me ; perhaps he knows 
that it is a purely professional interest I take in the 
collection ; that I am in the trade and have a second- 
hand shop of my own, full of poetical rubbish, and 
every sort of literary odds and ends, picked up at 
random, and all cast higgledy-piggledy into the same 
chaotic receptacle. His customers are as little like 
ordinary shoppers as he is like common tradesmen. 
They are in part the Canadians who work in the brick- 
yards, and it is surprising to find how much business 
can be transacted, and how many sharp bargains 
struck without the help of a common language. I 
am in the belief, which may be erroneous, that no- 
body is wronged in these trades. The taciturn store- 
keeper, who regards his customers with a stare of 
solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraor- 
dinary vicissitude of natm^e to the use of a lan- 
guage that practically amounts to deafness and dumb- 
ness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them 
to affect his commercial efficiency ; he drops them 
now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive 
Yankee idiom ; he knows very well when they 
mean to buy and when they do not ; and they. 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 85 

equally waiy and equally silent, tinswayed by the 
glib allurements of a salesman, judge of price and 
quality for themselves, make their solitary offer, and 
stand or fall by it. 

I am seldom able to conclude a pedestrian tour 
without a glance at the wonderful interior of this 
cheap store, and I know all its contents familiarly. 
I recognize wares that have now been on sale there 
for years ; I miss at first glance such accustomed 
objects as have been parted with between my fre- 
quent visits, and hail with pleasure the additions to 
that extraordinary variety. I can hardly, I suppose, 
expect the reader to sympathize with the joy I felt 
the other night, in discovering among the latter an 
adventurous and universally applicable sign-board 
advertising This House and Lot for Sale, and, inter- 
twined with the cast-off suspenders which long gar- 
landed a coffee-mill pendent from the roof, a newly 
added second-hand india-rubber ear-trumpet. Here 
and there, however, I hope a finer soul will relish, as 
I do, the poetry of thus buying and offering for sale 
the very most recondite, as well as the commonest 
articles of commerce, in the faith that one day the 
predestined purchaser will appear and carry oflP the 
article appointed him from the beginning of time. 
This faith is all the more touching, because the col- 
lector cannot expect to live until the whole stock is 
disposed of, and because, in the order of nature, 
much must at last fall to ruin unbought, unless the 
reporter's Devouring Element appears and gives a 
sudden tragical turn to the poem. 



86 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

It is the wliistle of a train drawing up at the 
neighboring station that calls me away from the 
second-hand store ; for I never find myself able to 
resist the hackneyed prodigy of such an ai-rival. It 
cannot cease to be impressive. I stand beside the 
track while the familiar monster writhes up to the 
station and disgorges its passengers, — suburbanly 
packaged, and bundled, and bagged, and even when 
empty-lianded somehow proclaiming the jaded char- 
acter of men that hurry their work all day to catch 
the evening train out, and their dreams all night to 
catch the morning train in, — and then I climb the 
station-stairs, and " hang with grooms and porters on 
the bridge," that I may not lose my ever-repeated 
sensation of having the train pass under my feet, 
and of seeing it rush away westward to the pretty 
blue hills beyond, — hills not too big for a man born 
in a plain-country to love. Twisting and trembling 
along the track, it dwindles rapidly in the perspec- 
tive, and is presently out of sight. It has left the 
city and the suburbs behind, and has sought the 
woods and meadows ; but Nature never in the least 
accepts it, and rarely makes its path a part of her 
landscape's loveliness. The train passes alien through 
all her moods and aspects ; the wounds made in her 
face by the road's sharp cuts and excavations are 
slowest of all wounds to heal, and the iron rails 
remain to the last as shackles upon her. Yet when 
the rails are removed, as has happened with a non- 
paying track in Charlesbridge, the road inspires a 
real tenderness in her. Then she bids it take on 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 81 

the grace that belongs to all ruin ; the grass creeps 
stealthily over the scarified sides of the embank- 
ments ; the golden-rod, and the purple-topped iron- 
weed, and the lady's-slipper, spring up in the hollows 
on either side, and — I am still thinking of that de- 
serted railroad which runs through Charlesbridge — 
hide with their leafage the empty tomato-cans and 
broken bottles and old boots on the ash- heaps 
dumped there ; Nature sets her velvety willows a 
waving near, and lower than their airy tops plans a 
vista of trees arching above the track, which is as 
wild and pretty and illusive a vista as the sunset 
ever cared to look through and gild a board fence 
beyond. 

Most of our people come from Boston on the 
horse-cars, and it is only the dwellers on the Avenue 
and the neighboring streets whom hurrying home- 
ward I follow away from the steam-car station. The 
Avenue is our handsomest street ; and if it were in 
the cosmopolitan citizen of Charlesbridge to feel any 
local interest, I should be proud of it. As matters 
are, I perceive its beauty, and I often reflect, with a 
pardonable satisfaction, that it is not only handsome, 
but probably the very dullest street in the world. It 
is magnificently long and broad, and is flanked nearly 
the whole way from the station to the colleges by 
pine palaces rising from spacious lawns, or from the 
green of trees or the brightness of gardens. The 
splendor is all very new ; but newness is not a fault 
that much affects architectural beauty, while it is the 
only one that time is certain to repair: and I find an 



88 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

honest and unceasing pleasure in the graceful lines 
of those palaces, which is not surpassed even by my 
appreciation of the vast quiet and monotony of the 
street itself. Commonly, when I emerge upon it 
from the grassy-bordered, succory-blossomed walks 
of Benicia Street, I behold, looking northward, a 
monumental horse-car standing — it appears for 
ages, if I wish to take it for Boston — at the head 
of Pliny Street ; and looking southward I see that 
other emblem of suburban life, an CKpress-wagon, 
fading rapidly in the distance. Haply the top of a 
buggy nods round the bend under the elms near the 
station ; and, if fortune is so lavish, a lady appears 
from a side street, and, while tarrying for the car, 
thrusts the point of her sun-umbrella into fhe sandy 
sidewalk. This is the mid-afternoon effect of the 
Avenue ; but later in the day, and well into the 
dusk, it remembers its former gayety as a trotting- 
course, — with here and there a spider-wagon, a 
twinkling-footed mare, and a guttural driver. On 
market-days its superb breadth is taken up by flocks 
of bleating sheep, and a pastoral tone is thus given to 
its tranquillity ; anon a herd of beef-cattle appears 
under the elms ; or a drove of pigs, many-pausing, 
inquisitive of the gutters, and quarrelsome as if they 
were the heirs of prosperity instead of doom, is 
slowly urged on toward the shambles. In the spring 
or the autumn, the Avenue is exceptionally enliv- 
ened by the progress of a brace or so of students 
who, in training for one of the University Courses 
of base-ball or boating, trot slowly and earnestly 



A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 89 

along the sidewalk, fists up, elbows, down, mouths 
shut, and a sense of immense responsibility visible in 
their faces. 

The summer is waning with the day as I turn 
from the Avenue into Benicia Street. This is the 
hour when the fly cedes to the mosquito, as the Tus- 
can poet says, and, as one may add, the frying grass- 
hopper yields to the shrilly cricket in noisiness. The 
embrowning air rings with the sad music made by 
these innumerable little violinists, hid in all the gar- 
dens round, and the pedestrian feels a sinking of the 
spirits not to be accounted for upon the theory that 
the street is duller than the Avenue, for it really is 
not so. 

Quick . now, the cheerful lamps of kerosene ! — 
without their light, the cry of those crickets, domi- 
nated for an instant, but not stilled, by the bellowing 
of a near-passing locomotive, and the baying of a dis- 
tant dog, were too much. If it were the last autumn 
that ever was to be, it could not be heralded with 
notes of dismaller effect. This is in fact the hour of 
supreme trial everywhere, and doubtless no one but 
a newly-accepted lover can be happy at twilight. In 
the city, even, it is oppressive ; in the country it is 
desolate ; in the suburbs it is a miracle that it is ever 
lived through. The night-winds have not risen yet 
to stir the languid foliage of the sidewalk maples ; 
the lamps are not yet lighted, to take away the 
gloom from the blank, staring windows of the houses 
near ; it is too late for letters, too early for a book. 



90 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

In town jour fancy would turn to the theatres ; in 
the country you would occupy yourself with cares of 
poultry or of stock : in the suburbs you can but sit 
upon your threshold, and fight the predatory mos- 
quito. 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 

At a former period the writer of this had the for- 
tune to serve his country in an Italian city whose 
great claim upon the world's sentimental interest is 
the fact that — 

" The sea is in her broad, her narrow streets 
Ebbing and flowing," 

and that she has no ways whatever for hoofs or 
wheels. In his quality of United States official, he 
was naturally called upon for information concerning 
the estates of Italians believed to have emigrated 
early in the century to Buenos Ayres, and was com- 
missioned to learn why certain persons in Mexico 
and Brazil, and the parts of Peru, had not, if they 
were still living, written home to their friends. On 
the other hand, he was intinisted with business 
nearly as pertinent and hopeful by some of his own 
countrymen, and it was not quite with surprise that 
he one day received a neatly lithographed circular 
with his name and address written in it, signed by a 
famous projector of such enterprises, asking him to 
cooperate for the introduction of horse-railroads in 
Venice. The obstacles to the scheme were of such 
a nature that it seemed hardly worth while even tc 
reply to the circular ; but the proposal was one of 



92 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

those bold flights of imagination which forever lift 
objects out of vulgar association. It has cast an 
enduring, poetic charm even about the horse-car in 
my mind, and I naturally look for many unprosaic 
aspects of humanity there. I have an acquaintance 
who insists that it is the place above all others suited 
to see life in every striking phase. He pretends to 
have witnessed there the reunion of friends who had 
not met in many years, the embrace, figurative of 
coui'se, of long lost brothers, the reconciliation of 
lovers ; I do not know but also some scenes of 
love-making, and acceptance or rejection. But my 
friend is an imaginative man, and may make himself 
romances. I myself profess to have beheld for the 
most part only mysteries ; and I think it not the 
least of these that, riding on the same cars day after 
day, one finds so many strange faces with so little 
variety. Whether or not that dull, jarring motion 
shakes inward and settles about the centres of men- 
tal life the sprightliness that should inform the vis- 
age, I do not know ; but it is certain that the empti- 
ness of the average passenger's countenance is some- 
thing wonderful, considered with reference to Na- 
ture's abhorrence of a vacuum, and the intellectual 
repute which Boston enjoys among envious New- 
Yorkers. It is seldom that a journey out of our cold 
metropohs is enlivened by a mystery so positive in 
character as the young lady in black, Avho alighted 
at a most ordinary little street in Old Charlesbridge, 
and heightened her effect by going into a French- 
roof house tksre that had no more right than a dry- 




The voiins lady in black, who alighted at a most ordinaiv little 
street." See page 02. 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 93 

goods box to receive a mystery. She was tall, and 
her lovely arms showed through the black gauze of 
her dress with an exquisite roundness and morhidezza. 
Upon her beautiful wrists she had heavy bracelets of 
dead gold, fashioned after some Etruscan device ; and 
from her dainty ears hung great hoops of the same 
metal and design, which had the singular privilege 
of touching,. now and then, her white columnar neck. 
A massive chain or necklace, also Etruscan, and 
also gold, rose and fell at her throat, and on one lit- 
tle ungloved hand glittered a multitude of rings. 
This hand was very expressive, and took a principal 
part in the talk which the lady held with her com- 
panion, and was as alert and quick as if trained in 
the gesticulation of Southern or Latin life some- 
where. Her features, on the contrary, were rather 
insipid, being too small and fine ; but they were re- 
deemed by the liquid splendor of her beautiful eyes, 
and the mortal pallor of her complexion. She was 
altogether so startling an apparition, that all of us 
jaded, commonplace spectres turned and fastened 
our weary, lack-lustre eyes upon her looks, with an 
utter inability to remove them. There was one fat, 
unctuous person seated opposite, to whom his interest 
was a torture, for he would have gone to sleep except 
for her remarkable presence : as it was, his heavy 
eyelids fell half-way shut, and drooped there at an 
agonizing angle, while his eyes remained immovably 
fixed upon that strange, death-white face. How it 
could have come of that colorlessness, — whether 
through long sickness or long residence in a tropical 



94 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

climate, — = was a question that perplexed another of 
the passengers, who would have expected to hear 
the lady speak any language in the world rather than 
English ; and to whom her companion or attendant 
was hardly less than herself a mystery, — being a 
dragon-like, elderish female, clearly a Yankee by 
birth, but apparently of many years' absence from 
home. The propriety of extracting these people 
from the horse-cars and transferring them bodily to 
the first chapter of a romance was a thing about 
which there could be no manner of doubt, and noth- 
ing prevented the abduction but the unexpected vol- 
untary exit of the pale lady. As she passed out 
everybody else awoke as from a dream, or as if freed 
from a potent fascination. It is part of the mystery 
that this lady should never have reaj)peared in that 
theatre of life, the horse-car ; but I cannot regi'et 
having never seen her more ; she was so inestimably 
precious to wonder that it would have been a kind of 
loss to learn anything about her. 

On the other hand, I should be glad if two young 
men who once presented themselves as mysteries 
upon the same stage could be so distinctly and 
sharply identified that all mankind should recognize 
them at the day of judgment. They were not so 
remarkable in the nature as in the degree of their 
offense ; for the mystery that any man should keep 
his seat in a horse-car and let a woman stand is but 
too sadly common. They say that this public un- 
kindness to the sex has come about through the in- 
gratitude of women, who have failed to return thanks 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 95 

for places offered them, and that it is a just and 
noble revenge we take upon them. There might be 
something advanced in favor of the idea that we law- 
making men, who do not oblige the companies 
to provide seats for every one, deserve no thanks 
from voteless, helpless women when we oflPer them 
places ; nay, that we ought to be glad if they do not 
reproach us for making that a personal favor which 
ought to be a common right. I would prefer, on the 
whole, to believe that this selfishness is not a con- 
certed act on our part, but a flower of advanced civ- 
ilization ; it is a ripe frait in European countries, 
and it is more noticeable in Boston than anywhere 
else in America. It is, in fact, one of the points of 
our high polish which people from the interior say 
first strikes them on coming among us ; for they de- 
clare — no doubt too modestly — that in their Boeo- 
tian wilds our Athenian habit is almost unknown. 
Yet it would not be fair to credit our whole popula- 
tion with it. I have seen a laborer or artisan rise 
from his place and offer it to a lady, while a dozen 
well-dressed men kept theirs ; and I know several 
conservative young gentlemen, who are still so old- 
fashioned as always to respect the weakness and wea- 
riness of women. One of them, I hear, has settled 
it in his own mind that if the family cook appears in 
a car where he is seated, he must rise and give her 
his place. This, perhaps, is a trifle idealistic ; but it 
is magnificent, it is princely. From his difficult 
height, we decline — through ranks that sacrifice 
themselves for women with bundles or children in 



96 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

arms, for old ladies, or for very young and pretty 
ones — to the men who give no odds to the most 
helpless creature alive. These are the men who do 
not act upon the promptings of human nature like 
the laborer, and who do not refine upon their duty 
(ike my young gentlemen, and make it their privilege 
to befriend the idea of womanhood ; they are men who 
have paid for their seats and are going to keep them. 
They have been at work, very probably, all day, and 
no doubt they are tired ; they look so, and try hard 
not to look ashamed of publicly considering them- 
selves before a sex which is born tired, and from 
which our climate and customs have drained so much 
health that society sometimes seems little better tlian 
a hospital for invalid woman, where every courtesy 
is likely to be a mercy done to a suflFerer. Yet the 
two young men of whom I began to speak were not 
apparently of this class, and let us hope they were 
foreigners, — say Englishmen, since Ave hate English- 
men the most. They were the only men seated, in 
a car full of people ; and when four or five ladies 
came in and occupied ihv aisle before them, they 
might have been puzzled which to offer their places 
to, if one of the ladies had not plainly been infirm. 
They settled the question — if there was any in 
their minds — by remaining seated, while the lady 
in front of them swung uneasily to and fro with the 
car, and appeared ready to sink at their feet. In 
another moment she had actually done so ; and, too 
weary to rise, she continued to crouch upon the 
floor of the car for the course of a mile, the young 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 97 

men resolutely keeping their places, and not rising 
till they were ready to leave the car. It was a horri- 
ble scene, and incredible, — that well-dressed woman 
sitting on the floor, and those two well-dressed men 
keeping their places ; it was as much out of keeping 
with our smug respectabilities as a hanging, and was 
a spectacle so paralyzing that public opinion took no 
action concerning it. A shabby person, standijig 
upon the platform outside, swore about it, between, 
expectorations : even the conductor's heart was 
touched ; and he said he had seen a good many hard, 
things aboard horse-cars, but that was a little the 
hardest ; he had never expected to come to that. 
These were simple people enough, and could not in- 
terest me a great deal, but I should have liked to. 
have a glimpse of the complex minds of those young 
men, and I should still like to know somethino- of the 
previous life that could have made their behavior pos- 
sible to them. They ought to make public the philo- 
sophic methods by which they reached that j)ass of 
unshamable selfishness. The information would be 
useful to a race which knows the sweetness of self- 
indulffence, and would fain know the art of so di'ucf- 
ging or besotting the sensibilities that it shall not 
feel disgraced by any sort of meanness. They might 
really have much to say for themselves ; as, that the 
lady, being conscious she could no longer keep her 
feet, had no right to crouch at theirs, and put them 
to so severe a test ; or that, having suffered her tO' 
sink there, they fell no further in the ignorant public 
opinion by suffering her to continue there. 



98 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

But I doubt if that other young man could saj 
anything for himself, who, when a pale, trembling 
woman was about to drop into the vacant place at 
his side, stretched his arm across it with, " This 
seat's engaged," till a robust young fellow, his friend, 
appeared, and took it and kept it all the way out from 
Boston. The commission of such a tragical wrong, 
involvino; a violation of common usage as well as the 
infliction of a positive cruelty, would embitter the 
life of an ordinary man, if any ordinary man were 
capable of it ; but let us trust that nature has pro- 
vided fortitude of every kind for the oiFender, and 
that he is not wrung by keener remorse than most 
would feel for a petty larceny. I dare say he would 
be eager at the first opportunity to rebuke the in- 
gratitude of women who do not thank their benefac- 
tors for giving them seats. It seems a little odd, by 
the way, and perhaps it is through the peculiar bless- 
ing of Providence, that, since men have determined 
by a savage egotism to teach the offending sex man- 
ners, their own comfort should be in the infliction of 
the penalty, and that it should be as much a pleasure 
as a duty to keep one's place. 

Perhaps when the ladies come to vote, they will 
abate, with other nuisances, the whole business of 
overloaded public conveyances. In the mean time, 
the kindness of women to each other is a notable fea- 
ture of all horse-car journeys. It is touching to see 
the smiling eagerness with which the poor things 
gather close their volumed skirts and make room for 
a weary sister, the tender looks of compassion which 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 09 

they bend upon the sufferers obliged to stand, the 
sweetness with which they rise, if they are young 
and strong, to offer their place to any infirm or 
heavily burdened person of their sex. 

But a journey to Boston is not entirely an expe- 
rience of bitterness. On the contrary, there are many 
things besides the mutual amiability of these beautiful 
martyrs which relieve its tedium and horrors. A 
whole car-full of people, brought into the closest 
contact with one another, yet in the absence of in- 
troductions never exchangino; a word, each being so 
sufficient to himself as to need no social stimulus 
whatever, is certainly an impressive and stately spec- 
tacle. It is a beautiful day, say ; but far be it from 
me to intimate as much to my neighbor, who plainly 
would rather die than thus commit himself with me, 
and who, in fact, would well-nigh strike me speech- 
less with surprise if he did so. If there is any ne- 
cessity for communication, as with the conductor, we 
essay first to express ourselves by gesture, and then 
utter our desires with a certain hollow and remote 
effect, which is not otherwise to be described. I have 
sometimes tried to speak above my breath, when, 
being about to leave the car, I have made a virtue 
of offering my place to the prettiest young woman 
standing, but I have found it impossible ; the genius 
loci, whatever it was., suppressed me, and I have 
gasped out my sham politeness as in a courteous 
nightmare. The silencing influence is quite success- 
fully resisted by none but the tipsy people who 
occasionally ride out with us, and call up a smile, 



100 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

sad as a gleam of winter sunshine, to our faces by their 
artless prattle. I remember one eventful afternoon 
that we were all but moved to laughter by the gayeties 
of such a one, who, even after he had ceased to talk, 
continued to amuse as by falling asleep, and repos- 
ing himself against the shoulder of the lady next him. 
Perhaps it is in acknowledgment of the agreeable 
variety they contribute to horse-car life, that the 
conductor treats his inebriate passengers with such 
unfailing tenderness and forbearance. I have never 
seen them molested, though I have noticed them in 
the indulgence of many eccentricities, and happened 
once even to see one of them sit down in a lady's lap. 
But that was on the night of Saint Patrick's day. 
Generally all avoidable indecorums are rare in the 
horse-cars, though during the late forenoon and early 
afternoon, in the period of lighter travel, I have 
found curious figures there : — among others, two 
old women, in the old-clothes business, one of whom 
was dressed, not very fortunately, in a gown with 
short sleeves, and inferentially a low neck ; a mender 
of umbrellas, with many unwholesome whity-brown 
wrecks of umbrellas about him ; a peddler of soap, 
who offered cakes of it to his fellow-passengers at a 
discount, apparently for friendship's sake ; and a cer- 
tain gentleman with a pock-marked face, and a beard 
dyed an unscrupulous purple, who sang himself a 
hymn all the way to Boston, and who gave me no 
sufficient reason for thinking him a sea-captain. Not 
far from the end of the Long Bridge, there is apt to 
be a number of colored ladies waiting to get into the 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 101 

car, or to get out of it, — usually one solemn mother 
in Ethiopia, and two or three mirthful daughters, 
who find it hard to suppress a sense of adventure, 
and to keep in the laughter that struggles out through 
their glittering teeth and eyes, and who place each 
other at a disadvantage by divers accidental and in- 
tentional bumps and blows- If they are to get out, 
the old lady is not certain of the place where, and, 
after making the car stop, and parleying with the 
conductor, returns to her seat, and is mutely held 
up to public scorn by one taciturn wink of the con- 
ductor's eye. 

Among horse-car types, I am almost ashamed to 
note one so common and observable as that middle- 
aged lady who gets aboard and will not see the one 
vacant seat left, but stands tottering at the door, 
blind and deaf to all the modest beckonings and 
benevolent gasps of her fellow-passengers. An air 
as of better days clings about her ; she seems a per- 
son who has known sickness and sorrow ; but so far 
from pitying her, you view her with inexpressible 
rancor, for it is plain that she ought to sit dowji, 
and that she will not. But for a point of honor the 
conductor would show her the vacant place ; this 
forbidding, however, how can he ? There she 
stands and sniffs drearily when you glance at her, as 
you must from time to time, and no wild turkey 
caught in a trap was ever more incapable of looking 
down than this middle-aged (shall I say also un- 
married ?) lady. 

Of course every one knows the ladies and gentle 



102 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

men who sit eater-cornered, and who will not move 
up ; and equally familiar is that large and ponderous 
person, who, feigning to sit down beside you, practi- 
cally sits down upon you, and is not incommoded by 
having your knee under him. He implies by this 
brutal conduct that you are taking up moi'e space 
than belongs to you, and that you are justly made 
an example of. 

I had the pleasure one day to meet on the horse- 
car an advocate of one of the great reforms of the 
day. He held a green bag upon his knees, and with- 
out any notice passed from a question of crops to a 
discussion of suffrage for the negro, and so to woman- 
hood suffrage. " Let the women vote," said he, — 
" let 'em vote if they want to. / don't care. Fact is, 
I should like to see 'em do it the first time. They're 
excitable, you know ; they're excitable ; " and he 
enforced his analysis of female character by thrusting 
his elbow sharply into my side. " Now, there's my 
wife ; I'd like to see her vote. Be fun, I tell you. 
And the girls, — Lord, the girls ! Circus wouldn't 
be anywhere." Enchanted with the picture which 
he appeared to have conjured up for himself, he 
laughed with the utmost relish, and then patting the 
green bag in his lap, which plainly contained a violin, 
" You see," he went on, " I go out playing for danc- 
ing-parties. Work all day at my trade, — I'm a 
carpenter, — and play in the evening. Take my little 
old ten dollars a night. And I notice the women a 
good deal ; and I tell you they're all excitable, and 
1 sKd like to see 'em vote. Vote right and vote 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 103 

often, — that's the ticket, eh ? " This friend of 
womanhood suffrage — whose attitude of curiosity and 
expectation seemed to me representative of that of 
a great many thinkers on the subject — no doubt was 
otherwise a reformer, and held that the coming man 
would not drink wine — if he could find whiskey. 
At least I should have said so, guessing from the 
odors he breathed along with his liberal sentiments. 

Something of the character of a college-town is 
observable nearly always in the presence of the 
students, who confound certain traditional ideas of 
students by their quietude of costume and manner, 
and whom Padua or Heidelberg would hardly know, 
but who nevertheless betray that they are band- 
ed to — 

" Scorn delights and live laborious days," 

by a uniformity in the cut of their trousers, or a 
clannishness of cane or scarf, or a talk of boats and 
base-ball held among themselves. One cannot see 
them without pleasure and kindness ; and it is no 
wonder that their young-lady acquaintances brighten 
so to recognize them on the horse-cars. There is 
much good fortune in the world, but none better than 
being an undergraduate twenty years old, hale, 
handsome, fashionably dressed, with the whole prom- 
ise of life before : it's a state of things to disarm even 
envy. With so much youth forever in her heart, it 
must be hard for our Charlesbridge to grow old : the 
generations arise and pass away, but in her veins is. 
still this tide of warm blood, century in and century 
»ut, so much the same from one age to another that 



104 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

it would be hardy to say it was not still one youthful- 
ness. There is a print of the village as it was a cycle 
since, showing the oldest of the college buildings, 
and upon the street in front a scholar in his schol- 
ar's-cap and gown, giving his arm to a very stylish 
girl of that period, who is dressed wonderfully like 
the girl of ours, so that but for the student's antique 
formality of costume, one might believe that he was 
handing her out to take the horse-car. There is no 
horse-car in the picture, — that is the only real differ- 
ence between then and now in our Charlesbridge, 
perennially young and gay. Have there not ever 
been here the same grand ambitions, the same high 
hopes, — and is not the unbroken succession of youth 
in these ? 

As for other life on the horse-car, it shows to little 
or no effect, as I have said. You can, of course, detect 
certain classes ; as, in the morning the business-men 
going in, to their counters or their desks, and in the 
afternoon the shoppers coming out, laden with paper 
parcels. But I think no one can truly claim to know 
the regular fi'om the occasional passengers by any 
o-reater cheerfulness in the faces of the latter. The 
horse-car will suffer no such inequality as this, but 
reduces us all to the same level of melancholy. It 
would be but a very unworthy kind of art which 
should seek to describe people by such merely exter- 
nal traits as a habit of carrying baskets or large 
travelling-bags in the car ; and the present muse 
scorns it, but is not above speaking of the frequent 
presence of those lovely young girls in which Boston 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 105 

and the suburban towns abound, and who, vvhethei 
they appear with rolls of music in their hands, or 
books from the circulating-libraries, or pretty parcels 
or hand-bags, would brighten even the horse-car if 
fresh young looks and gay and brilliant costumes could 
do so much. But they only add perplexity to the 
anomaly, which was already sufficiently trying with 
its contrasts of splendor and shabbiness, and such 
intimate association of velvets and patches as you see 
in the churches of Catholic countries, but nowhere 
else in the world except in our " coaches of the 
sovereign people." 

In winter, the journey to or from Boston cannot 
appear otherwise than very dreary to the fondest 
imagination. Coming out, nothing can look more 
arctic and forlorn than the river, double-shrouded in 
ice and snow, or sadder than the contrast offered to 
the same prospect in summer. Then all is laughing, 
and it is a joy in every nerve to ride out over the 
Long Bridge at high tide, and, looking southward, 
to see the wide crinkle and glitter of that beautiful 
expanse of water, which laps on one hand the gran- 
ite quays of the city, and on the other washes among 
the reeds and wild grasses of the salt-meadows. A 
ship coming slowly up the channel, or a dingy tug 
violently darting athwart it, gives an additional pleas- 
ure to the eye, and adds something dreamy or vivid 
to the beauty of the scene. It is hard to say at what 
hour of the summer's-day the prospect is loveliest ; 
and I am certainly not going to speak of the sunset 
as the least of its delights. When this exquisite 



106 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

spectacle is presented, the horse-car passenger, happy 
to chng with one foot to the rear platform-steps, 
looks out over the shoulder next him into fairy-land. 
Crimson and pui*ple the bay stretches westward till 
its waves darken into the grassy levels, where, here 
and there, a hay-rick shows perfectly black against 
the light. Afar off, southeastward and westward, 
the uplands wear a tinge of tenderest blue ; and in 
the nearer distance, on the low shores of the river, 
hover the white plumes of arriving and departing 
trains. The windows of the stately houses that over- 
look the water take the sunset from it evanescently, 
and begin to chill and darken before the crimson 
burns out of the sky. The windows are, in fact, best 
after nightfall, when they are brilliantly lighted from 
within ; and when, if it is a dark, warm night, and 
the briny fragrance comes up strong from the falling 
tide, the lights reflected far down in the still water, 
brino- a dream, as I have heard travelled Bostonians 
say, of Venice and her magical effects in the same 
kind. But for me the beauty of the scene needs the 
help of no such association ; I am content with it for 
what it is. I enjoy also the hints of spring which 
one gets in riding over the Long Bridge at low tide 
in the first open days. Then there is not only a 
vernal beating of carpets on the piers of the draw- 
bridge, but the piles and walls left bare by the re- 
ceding water show green patches of sea-weeds and 
mosses, and flatter the willing eye with a dim hint 
of summer. This reeking and saturated herbage, 
— which always seems to me, in contrast with dry- 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 107 

land growths, what the water-logged life of seafaring 
folk is to that which we happier men lead on shore, 
— taking so kindly the deceitful warmth and briglit- 
ness of the sun, has then a charm which it loses 
when summer really comes ; nor does one, later, have 
so keen an interest in the men wading about in the 
shallows below the bridge, who, as in the distance 
they stoop over to gather whatever shell-fish they 
seek, make a very fair show of being some ungainlier 
sort of storks, and are as near as we can hope to come 
to the spring-prophesying storks of song and story. 
A sentiment of the drowsiness that goes before the 
awakening of the year, and is so different from the 
drowsiness that precedes the great autumnal slumber, 
is in the air, but is gone when we leave the river 
behind, and strike into the straggling village be- 
yond. 

I maintain that Boston, as one approaches it and 
passingly takes in the line of Bunker Hill Monument, 
soaring preeminent among the emulous foundry- 
chimneys of the sister city, is fine enough to need 
no comparison with other fine sights. Thanks to the 
mansard curves and dormer-windows of the newer 
houses, there is a singularly picturesque variety 
among the roofs that stretch along the bay, and rise 
one above another on the city's three hills, grouping 
themselves about the State House, and surmounted 
by its India-rubber dome. But, after all, does human 
A^eakness crave some legendary charm, some grace 
of uncertain antiquity, in the picturesqueness it sees ? 
I own that the future, to which we are often re- 



108 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

ferred for the " stuff that dreams are made of," is 
more difficult for the fancy than the past, that the 
airy amphtude of its possibiHties is somewhat chilly, 
and that we naturally long for the snug quarters of 
old, made warm by many generations of life. Be- 
sides, Europe spoils us ingenuous Americans, and 
flatters our sentimentality into ruinous extrava- 
n;ances. Looking at her many-storied former times, 
we forget our own past, neat, compact, and conven- 
ient for the poorest memory to dwell in. Yet an 
American not infected with the discontent of travel 
could hardly approach this superb city Avithout feel- 
ing something of the coveted pleasure in her, without 
a reverie of her Puritan and Revolutionary times, 
and the sreat names and deeds of her heroic annals. 
I think, however, we were well to be rid of this 
yearning for a native American antiquity ; for in its 
induljzence one cannot but regard himself and his 
contemporaries as cumberers of the ground, delay- 
ing the consummation of that hoary past which will 
be so fascinating to a semi-Chinese posterity, and 
will be, ages hence, the inspiration of Pigeon -English 
poetry and romance. Let us make much of our two 
hundred and fifty years, and cherish the present as 
our golden age. We healthy-minded people in the 
horse-cars are loath to lose a moment of it, and are 
aggrieved that the draw of the bridge should be up, 
naturally looking on what is constantly liable to hap- 
pen as an especial malice of the fates. All the dri- 
vers of the vehicles that clog the draw on either side 
have a like sense of personal injury ; and apparently 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 109 

It would go hard with the captain of that leisurely 
vessel below if he were delivered into our hands. 
But this impatience and anger are entirely illusive. 

We are really the most patient people in the world, 
especially as regards any incorporated, non-political 
oppressions. A lively Gaul, who travelled among us 
some thirty years ago, found that, in the absence of 
political control, M'e gratified the human instinct of 
obedience by submitting to small tyrannies unknown 
abroad, and were subject to the steamboat- captain, 
the hotel-clerk, the stage-driver, and the waiter, who 
all bullied us fearlessly ; but though some vestiges of 
this bondage remain, it is probably passing away. 
The abusive Frenchman's assertion would not at least 
hold good concerning the horse-car conductors, who, 
in spite of a lingering preference for touching or 
punching passengers for their fare instead of asking 
for it, are commonly mild-mannered and good-tem- 
pered, and disposed to molest us as little as possible. 
I have even received from one of them a mark of 
such kindly familiarity as the offer of a check which 
he held between his lips, and thrust out his face to 
give me, both his hands being otherwise occupied ; 
and their lives are in nowise such luxurious careers 
as we should expect in public despots. The oppres- 
sion of the horse-car passenger is not from them, and 
the passenger himself is finally to blame for it. When 
the draw closes at last, and we rumble forward into 
the city street, a certain stir of expectation is felt 
among us. The long and eventful journey is nearly 
ended, and now we who are to get out of the cars 



110 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

can philosopliically amuse ourselves with the passions 
and sufFerino-s of those who are to return in our 
places. You must choose the time between five and 
six o'clock in the afternoon, if you would make this 
grand study of the national character in its perfec- 
tion. Then the spectacle offered in any arriving 
horse-car will serve your purpose. At nearly every 
corner of the street vip which it climbs stands an 
experienced suburban, who darts out upon the car, 
and seizes a vacant place in it. Presently all the 
places are taken, and before we reach Temple Street, 
where helpless groups of women are gathered to 
avail themselves of the first seats vacated, an alert 
citizen is stationed before each passenger who is to 
retire at the summons, " Please pass out forrad." 
When this is heard in Bowdoin Square, we rise and 
push forward, knuckling one another's backs in our 
eagerness, and perhaps glancing behind us at the tu- 
mult within. Not only are all our places occupied, 
but the aisle is left full of passengers precariously 
supporting themselves by the straps in the roof. The 
rear platform is stormed and carried by a party with 
bundles ; the driver is instantly surrounded by an- 
other detachment ; and as the car moves away from 
the office, the platform steps are filled. 

" Is it possible," I asked myself, when I had 
written as far as this in the present noble history, 
" that I am not exaggerating ? It can't be that this 
and the other enormities I have been describing are 
of daily occurrence in Boston. Let me go verify, 
at least, my picture of the evening horse-car." So 



BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. Ill 

I take my way to Bowdoin Square, and in the con- 
scientious spirit of modern inquiry, I get aboard the 
first car that comes up. Like every other car, it is 
meant to seat twenty passengers. It does this, and 
besides it carries in the aisle and on the platform 
forty passengers standing. The air is what you may 
imagine, if you know that not only is the place so 
indecently crowded, but that in the centre of the car 
are two adopted citizens, far gone in drink, who have 
the aspect and the smell of having passed the day in 
an ash-heap. These citizens being quite helpless 
themselves, are supported by the public, and repose 
in singular comfort upon all the passengers near 
them ; I, myself, contribute an aching back to the 
common charity, and a genteelly dressed young lady 
takes one of them from time to time on her knee. But 
they are comparatively an ornament to society till the 
conductor objects to the amount they offer him for 
fare ; for after that they wish to fight him during the 
journey, and invite him at short intervals to step out 
and be shown what manner of men they are. The 
conductor passes it off for a joke, and so it is, and a 
very good one. 

In that unhappy mass it would be an audacious 
spirit who should say of any particular arm or leg, 
" It is mine," and all the breath is in common. 
Nothing, it would seem, could add to our misery ; 
but we discover our error when the conductor 
squeezes a tortuous path through us, and collects the 
money for our transportation. I never can tell, dur- 



112 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

ing the performance of this feat, whether he or the 
passengers are more to be pitied. 

The people who are thus indecorously huddled and 
jammed together, without regai'd to age or sex, other- 
wise lead lives of at least comfort, and a good half of 
them cherish themselves in every physical way with 
unparalleled zeal. They are handsomely clothed ; 
they are delicately neat in linen ; they eat well, or, if 
not well, as well as their cooks will let them, and at 
all events expensively ; they house in dwellings ap- 
pointed in a manner undreamt of elsewhere in the 
world, — dwellings wherein furnaces make a sum- 
mer-heat, where fountains of hot and cold water flow 
at a touch, where light is created or quenched by the 
turning of a key, where all is luxurious upholstery, 
and magical ministry to real or fancied needs. They 
carry the same tastes with them to their places of 
business ; and when they " attend divine service," 
it is with the understanding that God is to receive 
them in a richly carpeted house, deliciously warmed 
and perfectly ventilated, where they may adore Him 
at their ease upon cushioned seats, — secured seats. 
Yet these spoiled children of comfort, when they ride 
to or from business or church, fail to assert rights 
that the benighted Cockney, who never heard of our 
plumbing and registers, or even the oppressed Paris- 
ian, who is believed not to change his linen from 
one revolution to another, having paid for, enjoys. 
When they enter the "full" horse-car, they find 
themselves in a place inexorable as the grave to 



BY FORSE-CAR TO BOSTON. 113 

their greenbacks, where not only is their adventi- 
tious consequence stripped from them, but the cour- 
tesies of life are impossible, the inherent dignity of 
the person is denied, and they are reduced below the 
level of the most uncomfortable nations of the Old 
World. The philosopher accustomed to draw con- 
solation from the sufferings of his richer fellow-men, 
and to infer an overruling Providence from their dis- 
graces, might well bless Heaven for the spectacle of 
such degradation, if his thanksgiving were not pre- 
vented by his knowledge that this is quite voluntary. 
And now consider that on every car leaving the city 
at this time the scene is much the same ; reflect that 
the horror is enacting, not only in Boston, but in 
New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Chi- 
cago, Cincinnati, — wherever the horse-car, that 
tinkles well-nigh round the Continent, is known ; 
remember that the same victims are thus daily sacri- 
ficed, without an effort to right themselves : and 
then you will begin to realize — dimly and imper- 
fectly, of course — the unfathomable meekness of the 
American character. The "full" horse-car is a 
prodigy whose likeness is absolutely unknown else- 
where, since the Neapolitan gig went out ; and I 
suppose it will be incredible to the future in our own 
country. When I see such a horse-car as I have 
sketched move away from its station, I feel that it is 
something not only emblematic and interpretative, 
but monumental ; and I know that when art becomes 
truly national, the overloaded horse-car will be cele- 
brated in painting and sculpture. And in after ages, 



114 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

when the oblique-eyed, swarthy Amencan of that 
time, pausing before some commemorative bronze or 
historical picture of our epoch, contemplates this 
stupendous spectacle of human endurance, I hope he 
will be able to philosophize more satisfactorily than 
we can now, concerning the mystery of our strength 
as a nation and our weakness as a public. 



A DAY'S PLEASURE. 

I. — The Morning. 

They were not a large family, and their pursuits 
and habits were very simple ; yet the summer was 
lapsing toward the first pathos of autumn before they 
found themselves all in such case as to be able to 
take the day's pleasure they had planned so long. 
They had agreed often and often that nothing could 
be more charmino; than an excursion down the Har- 
bor, either to Gloucester, or to Nahant, or to Nan- 
tasket Beach, or to Hull and Hingham, or to any 
point within the fatal boun^ beyond which is seasick^ 
ness. They had studied the steamboat advertise- 
ments, day after day, for a long time, without mak- 
ing up their minds which of these charming excur- 
sions would be the most delightful ; and when they 
had at last fixed upon one and chosen some day for 
it, that day was sure to be heralded by a long train 
of obstacles, or it dawned upon weather that was 
simply impossible. Besides, in the suburbs, you are 
apt to sleep late, unless the solitary ice-wagon of the 
neighborhood makes a very uncommon rumbling in 
going by ; and I believe that the excursion was sev- 
eral times postponed by the tardy return of the pleas- 
urers from dreamland, which, after all, is not the 



116 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

worst resort, or the least interesting — or profitable, 
for the matter of that. But at last the great day 
came, — a blameless Thursday alike removed from 
the cares of washing and ironing days, and from the 
fatigues with which every week closes. One of the 
family chose deliberately to stay at home ; but the se- 
verest scrutiny could not detect a hindrance in the 
health or circumstances of any of the rest, and the 
weather was delicious. Everything, in fact, was so 
fair and so full of promise, that they could almost fancy 
a calamity of some sort hanging over its perfection, 
and possibly bred of it ; for I suppose that we never 
have anything made perfectly easy for us without a 
certain reluctance and foreboding. That morning 
they all got up so early that they had time to waste 
over breakfast before taking the 7.30 train for Bos- 
ton ; and they naturally wasted so much of it that 
they reached the station only in season for the 8.00. 
But there is a diiference between reachino- the sta- 
tion and quietly taking the cars, especially if one of 
your company has been left at home, hoping to cut 
across and take the cars at a station which they reach 
some minutes later, and you, the head of the party, 
are obliged, at a loss of breath and personal comfort 
and dignity, to run down to that station and see that 
the belated member has arrived there, and then 
hurry back to your own, and embody the rest, with 
their accompanying hand-bags and wraps and sun- 
umbrellas, into some compact shape for removal into 
the cars, during the very scant minute that the train 
stops at Charlesbridge. Then when you are all 



! A day's pleasure. in 

aboard, and the tardy member has been duly taken 
up at the next station, and you would be glad to 
spend the time in looking about on the familiar vari- 
ety of life which every car presents in every train on 
every road in this vast American world, you are op- 
pressed and distracted by the cares which must at- 
tend the pleasure-seeker, and which the more thickly 
beset him the more deeply he plunges into enjoy- 
ment. 

I can learn veiy little from the note-book of the 
friend whose adventures I am relatino- in regard to 
the scenery of Somerville, and the region gener- 
ally through which the railroad passes between 
Charlesbridge and Boston ; but so much knowledge 
of it may be safely assumed on the part of the reader 
as to relieve me of the grave responsibility of describ- 
ing it. Still, I may say that it is not unpicturesque, 
and that I have a pleasure, which I hope the reader 
shares, in anything like salt meadows and all spaces 
subject to the tide, whether flooded by it or left bare 
with their saturated grasses by its going down. I 
think, also, there is something fine in the many- 
roofed, many-chimneyed highlands of Chelsea (if it is 
Chelsea), as you draw near the railroad bridge, and 
there is a pretty stone church on a hill-side there 
which has the good fortune, so rare with modern 
architecture and so common with the old, of seeming 
a natural outgrowth of the spot where it stands, and 
which is as purely an object of sssthetic interest to 
me, who know nothing of its sect or doctrine, as any 
church in a picture could be ; and there is, also, the 



118 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

Marine Hospital on the heights (if it is the Marine 
Hospital), from M'hich I hope the inmates can behold 
the ocean, and exult in whatever misery keeps them 
ashore. 

But let me not so hasten over this part of my 
friend's journey as to omit all mention of the amphib- 
ious Irish houses which stand about on the low lands 
along the railroad-sides, and which you half expect 
to see plunge into the tidal mud of the neighborhood, 
with a series of hoarse croaks, as the train ap- 
proaches. Perhaps twenty-four trains pass those 
houses every twenty-four hours, and it is a wonder 
that the inhabitants keep their interest in them, or 
have leisure to bestow upon any of them. Yet, as 
you dash along so bravely, you can see that you ar- 
rest the occupations of all these villagers as by a kind 
of enchantment ; the children pause and turn their 
heads toward you from their mud-pies (to the produc- 
tion of which there is literally no limit in that re- 
gion) ; the matron rests one parboiled hand on her 
hip, letting the other still linger listlessly upon the 
wash-board, while she lifts her eyes from the suds to 
look at you ; the boys, who all summer long are for- 
ever just going into the water or just coming out of 
it, cease their buttoning or unbuttoning ; the baby, 
which has been run after and caught and suitably 
posed, turns its anguished eyes upon you, where also 
falls the mother's gaze, while her descending palm is 
arrested in mid air. I forbear to comment upon the 
surprising populousness of these villages, where, in 
obedience to all the laws of health, the inhabitants 




That sweet young blonde, who arrives by most trahis." See page 119. 



J 



A day's pleasure. 119 

ought to be wasting miserably away, but where tliey 
flourish in spite of them. Even Accident here seems 
to be robbed of half her malevolence ; and that baby 
(who will presently be chastised with terrific uproar) 
passes an infancy of intrepid enjoyment amidst the 
local perils, and is no more affected by the engines 
and the cars than by so many fretful hens with their 
attendant broods of chickens. 

When sometimes I long for the excitement and 
variety of travel, which, for no merit of mine, I knew 
in other days, I reproach myself, and silence all my 
repinings with some such question as, Where could 
you find more variety or greater excitement than 
abounds in and near the Fitchburg Depot when a 
train arrives ? And to tell the truth, there is some- 
thing very inspiring in the fine eagerness with which 
all the passengers rise as soon as the locomotive be- 
gins to slow, and huddle forward to the door, in their 
impatience to get out ; while the suppressed vehe- 
mence of the hackmen is also thrilling in its way, not 
to mention the instant clamor of the baggage-men as 
they read and repeat the numbers of the checks in 
strident tones. It would be ever so interesting to 
depict all these people, but it would require volumes 
for the work, and I reluctantly let them all pass out 
without a word, — all but that sweet young blonde 
who arrives by most trains, and who, putting up her 
eye-glass with a ravishing air, bewitchingly peers 
round among the bearded faces, with little tender 
looks of hope and trepidation, for the face which she 
wants, and which presently bursts through the circle 



120 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

of strancre visages. The owner of the face then hur- 
ries forward to meet that sweet blonde, who gives 
him a little drooping hand as if it were a delicate 
flower she laid in his ; there is a brief mutual hesita- 
tion long enough merely for an electrical thrill to 
run from heart to heart through the clasping hands, 
and then he stoops toward her, and distractingly 
kisses her. And I say that there is no law of con- 
science or propriety worthy the name of law — bar- 
barity, absurdity, call it rather — to prevent any one 
from availing himself of that providential near-sight- 
edness, and beatifying himself upon those lips, — 
nothing to prevent it but that young fellow, whom 
one might not, of course, care to provoke. 

Among the people who now rush forward and 
heap themselves into the two horse-cars and one 
omnibus, placed before the depot by a wise fore- 
thought for the public comfort to accommodate the 
train-load of two hundred passengers, I always note 
a type that is both pleasing and interesting to me. 
It is a lady just passing middle life ; from her kindly 
eyes the envious crow, whose footprints are just 
traceable at their corners, has not yet drunk the 
brightness, but she looks just a thought sadly, if very 
serenely, from them. I know nothing in the world 
of her ; I may have seen her twice or a hundred 
times, but I must always be making bits of romances 
about her. That is she in faultless gray, with the 
neat leather bag in her lap, and a bouquet of the 
first autumnal blooms perched in her shapely hands, 
which are prettily yet substantially gloved in some 



A day's pleasure. 121 

sort of gauntlets. She can be easy and dignified, 
my dear middle-aged heroine, even in one of our 
horse-cars, where people are for the most part packed 
like cattle in a pen. She shows no trace of dust or 
fatigue from the thirty or forty miles which I choose 
to fancy she has ridden from the handsome elm- 
shaded New Eno-land town of five or ten thousand 
people, where I choose to think she lives. From a 
vague horticultural association with those gauntlets, 
as well as from the autumnal blooms, I take it she 
loves flowers, and gardens a good deal with her own 
hands, and keeps house-plants in the winter, and of 
course a canary. Her dress, neither rich nor vulgar, 
makes me believe her fortunes modest and not re- 
cent ; her gentle face has just so much intellectual 
character as it is good to see in a woman's face ; I 
suspect that she reads pretty regularly the new 
poems and histories, and I know that she is the life 
and soul of the local book-club. Is she married, or 
widowed, or one of the superfluous forty thousand ? 
That is what I never can tell. But I think that 
most probably she is married, and that her husband 
is very much in business, and does not share so 
much as he respects her tastes. I have no particular 
reason for thinking that she has no children now, 
and that the sorrow for the one she lost so long ago 
has become only a pensive silence, which, however, 

a long summer twilight can yet deepento tears 

Upon my word ! Am I then one to give way to 
this sort of thing ? Madam, I ask pardon. I have 
no right to be sentimentalizing you. Yet your face 



122 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

is one to make people dream kind things of you. 
and I cannot keep my reveries away from it. 

But in the mean time I neglect the momentous 
history which I have proposed to write, and leave 
my day's pleasurers to fade into the background of a 
fantastic portrait. The truth is, I cannot look with- 
out pain upon the discomforts which they suffer at 
this stage of their joyous enterprise. At the best, 
the portables of such a party are apt to be grievous 
embarrassments : a package of shawls and parasols 
and umbrellas and India-rubbers, however neatly 
made up at first, quickly degenerates into a shapeless 
mass, which has finally to be carried with as great 
tenderness as an ailing child ; and the lunch is pretty 
sure to overflow the hand-bags and to eddy about 
you in paper parcels ; while the bottle of claret, that 
bulges the side of one of the bags, and 

" That will show itself without," 

defying your attempts to look as it were cold tea, 
gives a crushing touch of disreputability to the whole 
affair. Add to this the fact that but half the party 
have seats, and that the others have to sway and 
totter about the car in that sudden contact with all 
varieties of fellow-men, to which we are accustomed 
in the cars, and you must allow that these poor 
merrymakers have reasons enough to rejoice when 
this part of their day's pleasure is over. They are 
so plainly bent upon a sail down the Harbor, that 
before they leave the car they become objects of 
public interest, and are at last made to give some 
account of themselves. 



A day's pleasure. 123 

" Going for a sail, I presume ? " says a person 
hitherto in conversation with the conductor. " Well, 
I Avouldn't mind a sail myself to-day." 

" Yes," answers the head of the party, " going to 
Gloucester." 

" Guess not," says, very coldly and decidedly, 
one of the passengers, who is reading that mornhig's 
"Advertiser ; " and when the subject of this surmise 
looks at him for explanations, he adds, " The City 
Council has chartered the boat for to-day." 

Upon this the excursionists fall into great dismay 
and bitterness, and upbraid the City Council, and 
wonder why last night's " Transcript " said nothing 
about its oppressive action, and generally bewail 
their fate. But at last they resolve to go some- 
where, and, being set down, they make up their 
warring minds upon Nahant, for the Naliant boat 
leaves the wharf nearest them ; and so tliey liuxTy 
away to India Wharf, amidst barrels and hak^s and 
boxes and hacks and trucks, with interminable string- 
teams passing before them at every crossing. 

" At any rate," says the leader of the expcflition, 
" we shall see the Gardens of Maolis, — those en- 
chanted gardens which have fairly been advertised 
into my dreams, and where I've been told," he 
continues, with an effort to make the prospect an 
attractive one, yet not without a sense of the meagre- 
ness of the materials, " they have a grotto and a 
Avooden bull." 

Of course, there is no reason in nature why a 
wooden bull should be more pleasing than a flesh- 



124 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

and-blood bull, but it seems to encourage the com 
pany, and they set off again with renewed speed, 
and at last reach India Wharf in time to see the 
Nahant steamer packed full of excursionists, with a 
crowd of people still waiting to go aboard. It does 
not look inviting, and they hesitate. In a minute 
or two their spirits sink so low, that if they should 
see the wooden bull step out of a grotto on the deck 
of the steamer the spectacle could not revive them. 
At that instant they think, with a surprising single- 
ness, of Nantasket Beach, and the bright colors in 
which the Gardens of Maolis but now appeared fade 
away, and they seem to see themselves sauntering 
along the beautiful shore, while the white-crested 
breakers crash upon the sand, and run up 

" In tender-curving lines of creamy spray," 

quite tothe feet of that lotus-eating party. 

" Nahant is all rocks," says the leader to Aunt 
Melissa, who hears him with a sweet and tranquil 
patience, and who would enjoy or suffer anything 
with the same expression ; " and as you've never 
yet seen the open sea, it's fortunate that we go to 
Nantasket, for, of course, a beach is more character- 
istic. But now the object is to get there. The boat 
will be starting in a few moments, and I. doubt 
whether we can walk it. How far is it," he asks, 
'turning toward a respectable-looking man, " to Liv- 
erpool Wharf?" 

" Well, it's consid'able ways," says the man, smil- 
ing. 



A day's pleasure. 125 

" Then we must take a hack," says the pleasure! 
to his party. " Come on." 

" I've got a hack," observes the man, in a casual 
way, as if the fact might possibly interest. 

" O, you have, have you ? Well, then, put us 
into it, and drive to Liverpool Wharf; and hurry." 

Either the distance was less than the hackman 
fancied, or else he drove thither with unheard-of 
speed, for two minutes later he set them down on 
Liverpool \Vharf. But swiftly as they had come 
the steamer had been even more prompt, and she 
now turned toward them a beautiful wake, as she 
pushed farther and farther out into the harbor. 

The hackman took his two dollars for his four 
passengers, and was rapidly mounting his box, — 
probably, to avoid idle reproaches. " Wait ! " said 
the chief pleasurer. Then, " When does the next 
boat leave ? " he asked of the agent, who had 
emerged with a compassionate face from the waiting- 
rooms on the wharf. 

" At half past two." 

" And it's now five minutes past nine," moaned 
the menymakers. 

" Why, I'll tell you what you can do," said the 
agent ; " you can go to Hingham by the Old Colony 
cars, and so come back by the Hull and Hingham 
boat." 

" That's it ! " chorused his listeners, " we'll go ; "' 
and " Now," said their spokesman to the driver^ 
" I dare say you didn't know that Liverpool Wharf 
was so near ; but I don't think you've earned your 



126 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

money, and you ought to take us on to the Old 
Colony Depot for half-fares at the most." 

The driver looked pained, as if some small tatters 
and shreds of conscience were flapping uncomfortably 
about his otherwise dismantled spirit. Then he 
seemed to thhik of his wife and family, for he put 
on the air of a man who had already made great 
sacrifices, and " I couldn't, really, I couldn't afford 
it," said he ; and as the victims turned from him in 
disgust, he chirruped, to his horses and drove off. 

"Well," said the pleasurers, " we won't give it 
up. We will have our day's pleasure after all. 
But what can we do to kill five hours and a half? 
It's miles away from everything, and, besides, there's 
nothing even if we were there." At this image of 
their remoteness and the inherent desolation of Bos- 
ton they could not suppress some sighs, and in the 
mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the waiting- 
room, which opened on the farther side upon the 
water, and sat contentedly down on one of the 
benches ; the rest, from slieer vacuity and irresolu- 
tion, followed, and thus, without debate, it was 
settled that they should wait there till the boat left. 
The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could 
to alleviate the situation : he gave them each the 
advertisement of his line of boats, neatly printed 
upon a card, and then he went away. 

All this prospect of waiting would do well enough 
for the ladies of the party, but there is an impatience 
in the masculine fibre which does not brook the no- 
tion of such prolonged repose ; and the leader of the 



A day's PLEASURE. 127 

excursion presently pretended an important errand 
up town, — nothing less, in fact, than to buy a 
tumbler out of which to drink their claret on the 
beach. A holiday is never like any other day to the 
man who takes it, and a festive halo. seemed to en- 
wrap the excursionist as he pushed on through the 
busy streets in the cool shadow of the vast granite 
palaces wherein the genius of business loves to house 
itself in this money-making land, and inhaled the 
odors of great heaps of leather and spices and dry 
goods as he passed the open doorways, — odors that 
mixed pleasantly with the smell of the freshly 
watered streets. When he stepped into a crockery 
store to make his purchase a sense of pleasure-taking 
did not fail him, and he fell naturally into talk with 
the clerk about the weather and such pastoral topics. 
Even when he reached the establishment where his 
own business days were passed some glamour seemed 
to be cast upon familiar objects. To the disen- 
chanted eye all things were as they were on all 
other dullish days of summer, even to the accus- 
tomed bore leaning up against his fav^orite desk and 
transfixing his habitual victim with his usual theme. 
Yet to the gaze of this pleasure-taker all was subtly 
changed, and he shook hands right and left as he 
entered, to the marked surprise of the objects of his 
effusion. He had merely come to get some news- 
papers to help pass away the long moments on the 
wharf, and when he had found these, he hurried 
back thither to hear what had happened during his 
absence. 



128 SUBUKBAN SKETCHES. 

It seemed that there had hardly ever been such 
an eventful period in the lives of the family before, 
and he listened to a minute account of it from Cousin 
Lucy. " You know, Frank," says she, " that Sallie's 
one idea in life is to keep the baby from getting the 
whooping-cough, and I declare that these premises 
have done nothing but reecho with the most dolo- 
rous whoops ever since you've been gone, so that at 
times, in my fear that Sallie would think I'd been 
careless about the boy, I've been ready to throw 
myself into the water, and nothing's prevented me 
but the doubt whether it wouldn't be better to 
throw in the whoopers instead." 

At this moment a pale little girl, with a face wan 
and sad through all its dirt, came and stood in the 
doorway nearest the baby, and in another instant 
she had burst into a whoop so terrific that, if she had 
meant to have his scalp next it could not have been 
more dreadful. Then she subsided into a deep and 
pathetic quiet, with that air peculiar to the victims 
of her disorder of having done nothing noticeable. 
But her outburst had set at work the mysterious 
machinery of half a dozen other whooping-coughers 
lurking about the building, and all unseen they 
wound themselves up with appalling rapidity, and in 
the utter silence which followed left one to think 
they had died at the climax. 

" Why, it's a perfect whooping-cough factory, 
this place," cries Cousin Lucy in a desperation. 
" Go away, do, please, from the baby, you poor little 
dreadful object you," she continues, turning upon 



A day's pleasure. 129 

the only visible operative in the establishment. 
" Here, take this ; " and she bribes her with a bit of 
sponge-cake, on which the child runs lightly off along 
the edcje of the Avharf " That's been another of 
their projects for driving me wild," says Cousin 
Lucv, — " tryincr to take their own lives in a hun- 
dred ways before my face and eyes. Why wdl their 
mothers let them come here to play? " 

Really, they were very melancholy little figures, 
and might have gone near to make one sad, even if 
they had not been constantly imperilling their lives. 
Thanks to its being summer-time, it did not much 
matter about the scantiness of their clothing, but 
their squalor was depressing, it seemed, even to 
themselves, for they were a mournful-looking set of 
children, and in their dangerous sports trifled silently 
and almost gloomily with death. There were none 
of them above eight or nine years of age, and most 
of them had the care of smaller brothers, or even 
babes in arms, whom they were thus early muring 
to the perils of the situation. The boys were dressed 
in pantaloons and shirts which no excess of rolling 
up in the legs and arms could make small enough, 
and the incorrigible too-bigness of which rendered 
the favorite amusements still more hazardous from 
their liability to trip and entangle the wearers. The 
little girls had on each a solitary garment, which 
hung about her gaunt person with antique severity 
of outline ; while the babies were multitudinously 
swathed in whatever fragments of dress could be 
tied or pinned or plastered on. Their faces were 
9 



130 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

strikingly and almost ingeniously dirty, and their 
distractions among the coal-heaps and cord-wood 
constantly added to the variety and advantage of 
these effects. 

" Why do their mothers let them come here ? " 
muses Frank aloud. " Why, because it's so safe, 
Cousin Lucy. At home, you know, they'd have to 
be playing upon the sills of fourth-floor windows, and 
here they're out of the way and can't hurt them- 
selves. Why, Cousin Lucy, this is their park, — 
their Public Garden, their Bois de Boulogne, their 
Cascine. And look at their gloomy little faces ! 
Aren't they taking their pleasure in the spirit of the 
very highest fashion ? I was at Newport last sum- 
mer, and saw the famous driving on the Avenue in 
those pony phaetons, dog-carts, and tubs, and three- 
story carriages with a pair of footmen perching like 
storks upon each gable, and I assui'e you that all 
those ornate and costly phantasms (it seems to me 
now like a sad, sweet vision) had just the expression 
of these poor children. We're taking a day's pleas- 
ure ourselves, cousin, but nobody would know it from 
our looks. And has nothing but whooping-cough 
happened since I've been gone ? " 

" Yes, we seem to be so cut off fi'om e very-day 
associations that I've imagined myself a sort of tour- 
ist, and I've been to that Catholic church over yon- 
der, in hopes of seeing the Murillos and Raphaels; 
but I found it locked up, and so I trudged back with- 
out a sight of the masterpieces. But what's the rea- 
son l^liat all the shops hereabouts have nothing but 



A day's pleasure. 131 

luxuries for sale ? The windows are perfect tropics 
of oranges, and lemons, and belated bananas, and to- 
bacco, and peanuts." 

" Well, the poor really seem to use more of those 
luxuries than anybody else. I don't blame them. I 
shouldn't care for the necessaries of life myself, if I 
found them so hard to get." 

" When I came back here," says Cousin Lucy, 
without heeding these flippant and heartless words, 
" I found an old gentleman who has somethino; to do 
with the boats, and he sat down, as if it were a part 
of his business, and told me nearly the whole history 
of his life. Isn't it nice of them, keeping an Autobi- 
ographer ? It makes the time pass so swiftly when 
you're waiting. This old gentleman was born — 
who'd ever think it? — ^\ip there in Pearl Street, 
where those pitiless big granite stores are now ; and, 
I don't know why, but the idea of any human baby 
being born in Pearl Street seemed to me one of the 
saddest things I'd ever heard of." 

Here Cousin Lucy went to the rescue of the nurse 
and the baby, who had got into one of their period- 
ical difficulties, and her interlocutor turned to Aunt 
Melissa. 

" I think, Franklin," says Aunt Melissa, " that it 
was wrong to let that nurse come and bring the 
baby." 

" Yes, I know. Aunty, you have those old-estab- 
lished ideas, and they're very right," answers her 
nephew ; " but just consider how much she enjoys 
it, and how vastly the baby adds to the pleasure of 
this charmins: excursion ! " 



132 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

Aunt Melissa made no reply, but sat looking 
thoughtfully out upon the bay. " I presume you 
think the excursion is a failure," she said, after a 
while ; " but I've been enjoying every minute of the 
time here. Of course, I've never seen the open sea, 
and I don't know about it, but I feel here just as if 
I were spending a day at the seaside." 

" Well," said her nephew, " I shouldn't call this 
exactly a watering-place. It lacks the splendor and 
gayety of Newport, in a certain degree, and it hasn't 
the illustrious seclusion of Nahant. The surf isn't 
very fine, nor the beach particularly adapted to bath- 
ing ; and yet, I must confess, the outlook from here 
is as lovely as anything one need have." 

And to tell the truth, it was very pretty and in- 
teresting. The landward environment was as com- 
monplace and mean as it could be : a yardful of dis- 
mal sheds for coal and lumber, and shanties for 
offices, with each ofiice its safe and its desk, its 
whittled arm-chair and its spittoon, its fly that shooed 
not, but buzzed desperately against the grimy pane, 
which, if it had really had that boasted microscopic 
eye, it never would have mistaken for the unblem- 
ished daylight. Outside of this yard was the usual 
wharfish neighborhood, with its turmoil of trucks and 
carts and fleet express-wagons, its building up and 
pulling down, its discomfort and clamor of every sort, 
and its shops for the sale, not only of those luxuries 
which Lucy had mentioned, but of such domestic re- 
freshments as lemon-pie and hulled-corn. 

When, however, you turned your thoughts and 



A day's pleasure. 13c 

eyes away from this aspect of it, and looked out upon 
the water, the neighborhood gloriously retrieved it- 
self. There its poverty and vulgarity ceased ; there 
its beauty and grace abounded. A light breeze ruf- 
fled the face of the bay, and the innumerable little 
sail-boats that dotted it took the sun and wind upon 
their wings, which they dipped almost into the spar- 
kle of the water, and flew lightly hither and thither 
like gulls that loved the brine too well to rise wholly 
from it ; larger ships, farther or nearer, puffed or 
shrank their sails as they came and went on the er- 
rands of commerce, but always moved as if bent 
upon some dreamy affair of pleasure ; the steam- 
boats that shot vehemently across their tranquil 
courses seemed only gayer and vivider visions, but 
not more substantial ; yonder, a black sea-going 
steamer passed out between the far-off" islands, and 
at last left in the sky above those reveries of fortifica- 
tion, a whiff" of sombre smoke, dark and unreal as a 
memory of battle ; to the right, on some line of rail- 
road, long-plumed trains arrived and departed like 
pictures passed through the slide of a magic-lantern ; 
even a pile-driver, at work in the same direction, 
seemed to have no malice in the blows which, after 
a loud clucking, it dealt the pile, and one understood 
that it was mere conventional violence like that of 
I Punch to his baby. 

" Why, what a lotus-eating life this is ! " said 
Frank, at last. " Aunt Melissa, I don't wonder 
you think it's like the seaside. It's a great deal bet- 
ter than the seaside. And now, just as we've en- 



134 ' SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

tered into the spirit of it, the time's up for the ' Rose 
Standish' to come and bear us from its dehghts. 
When will the boat be in? " he asked of the Auto- 
biographer, whom Lucy had pointed out to him. 

" Well, she's ben in half an hour, now. There she 
lays, just outside the ' John Romer.' " 

There, to be sure, she lay, and those pleasure- 
takers had been so lost in the rapture of waiting and 
the beauty of the scene as never to have noticed her 
arrival. 



II. — The Afternoon. 

It is noticeable how many people there are in the 
world that seem bent always upon the same purpose 
of amvisement or business as one's self. If you keep 
quietly about your accustomed affairs, there are all 
your neighbors and acquaintance hard at it too ; if 
you go on a journey, choose what train you will, the 
cars are filled with travellers in your direction. You 
take a day's pleasure, and everybody abandons his 
usual occupatiqn to crowd upon your boat, whether 
it is to Gloucester, or Nahant, or to Nantasket Beach 
you go. It is very hard to believe that, from what- 
ever channel of life you abstract yourself, still the 
great sum of it presses forward as before : that busi- 
ness is carried on though you are idle, that men 
amuse themselves though you toil, that every ti'ain 
is as crowded as that you travel on, that the theatre 
or the church fills its boxes or pews without you per- 
fectly well. I suppose it would not be quite agree- 
able to believe all this ; the opposite illusion is far 
more flattering ; for if each one of us did not take 
the world with him now at every turn, should he not 
have to leave it behind him when he died? And 
that, it must be owned, would not be agreeable, nor 
is the fact quite conceivable, though ever so many 
myriads in so many million years have proved it. 



136 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

When our friends first went aboard the "Rose 
Standish " that day they were almost the sole passen- 
gers, and they had a feeling of ownership and privacy 
which was pleasant enough in its way, but which 
they lost afterwards ; though to lose it was also pleas- 
ant, for enjoyment no more likes to be solitary than 
oin does, which is notoriously gregarious, and I dare 
say would hardly exist if it could not be committed 
in company. The preacher, indeed, little knows the 
comfortable sensation we have in beino: called fellow- 
sinners, and what an effective shield for his guilt 
each makes of his neighbor's hard-heartedness. 

Cousin Frank never felt how strange was a lonely 
transgression till that day, when in the silence of the 
little cabin he took the bottle of claret from the hand- 
bag, and prepared to moisten the family lunch with it. 
"I think. Aunt Melissa," he said, "we had better 
lunch now, for it's a quarter past two, and we shall 
not get to the beach before four. Let's improvise a 
beach of these chairs, and that water-urn yonder can 
stand for the breakers. . Now, this is truly like New- 
port and Nahant," he added, after the little arrange- 
ment was complete ; and he was about to strip away 
the bottle's jacket of brown paper, when a lady much 
wrapped up came in, and, reclining upon one of the 
opposite seats, began to take them all in with a severe 
serenity of gaze that made them feel for a moment 
like a party of low foreigners, — like a set of German 
atheists, say. Frank kept on the bottle's paper jacket, 
and as the single tumbler of the party circled from 
mouth to mouth, each of them tried to give the 



A day's pleasure. 137 

honest drink the false air of a medicinal potion ol 
some sort ; and to see Aunt Melissa sipping it, no 
one could have put his hand on his heart and sworn 
it was not elderberry wine, at the worst. In spite 
of these efforts, they all knew that they had suffered 
a hopeless loss of repute ; yet after the loss' was 
confessed, I am not sure that they were not the gayer 
and happier through this '* freedom of a broken law." 
At any rate, the lunch passed off very merrily, and 
when they had put back the fragments of the feast 
into the bags, they went forward to the bow of the 
boat, to get good places for seeing the various people 
as they came aboard, and for an outlook upon the 
bay when the boat should start. 

I suppose that these were not very remarkable 
people, and that nothing but the indomitable interest 
our friends took in the human race could have 
enabled them to feel any concern in their com- 
panions. It was, no doubt, just such a company as 
goes down to Nantasket Beach every pleasant day in 
summer. Certain ones among them were distin- 
guishable as sojourners at the beach, by an air of 
familiarity with the business of getting there, an 
indifference to the prospect, and an indefinable touch 
of superiority. These read their newspapers in 
quiet corners, or, if they were not of the newspaper 
sex, made themselves" comfortable in the cabins, and 
looked about them at the other passengers with 
looks of lazy surprise, and just a hint of scorn for 
their interest in the boat's departure. Our day's 
pleasurers took it that the lady whose steady gaze 



138 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

had reduced them, when at hinch, to ST>ch a low ebb 
of shabbiness, was a regular boarder, at the least, in 
one of the beach hotels. A few other passengers 
were, like themselves, mere idlers for a day, and 
were eairer to see all tliat the boat or the vovaffe 
offered of novelty. There were clerks and men who 
had book-keeping written in a neat mercantile hand 
upon their faces, and who had evidently been given 
that afternoon for a breathing-time ; and there were 
strangers who were going down to the beach for the 
sake of the charmino- view of the harbor which the 
trip afforded. Here and there were people who 
were not to be classed with any certainty, — as a pale 
young man, handsome in his undesirable way, who 
looked like a steamboat pantry boy not yet risen to 
be bar-tender, but rapidly rising, and who sat care- 
fully balanced upon the railing of the boat, chatting 
with two young girls, who heard his broad sallies with 
continual snickers, and interchanged saucy comments 
with that prompt up-and-coming manner which is so 
large a part of non-humorous humor, as Mr. Lowell 
calls it, and now and then pulled and pushed each 
other. It was a scene worth study, for in no other 
country could anything so bad have been without 
being vastly worse ; but here it was evident that 
there was nothing worse than you saw ; and, indeed, 
these persons formed a sort of relief to the other 
passengers, who were nearly all monotonously well- 
behaved. Amongst a few there seemed to be 
acquaintance, but the far greater part were unknown 
to one another, and there were no words wasted by 



A day's pleasure. 139 

any one. I believe the English traveller who ha& 
taxed our nation with inquisitiveness for half a cen- 
tury is at last beginning to find out that we do not 
ask questions because we have the still more vicious 
custom of not opening our mouths at all when with 
strangers. 

It was a good hour after our friends got aboard 
before the boat left her moorings, and then it was 
not without some secret dreads of sea-sickness that 
Aunt Melissa saw the seething brine widen between 
her and the familiar wharf-house, where she now 
seemed to have spent so large a part of her life. 
But the multitude of really charming and interesting 
objects that presently fell under her eye soon dis- 
tracted her from those gloomy thoughts. 

There is always a shabbiness about the wharves 
of seaports ; but I must own that as soon as you get 
a reasonable distance from them in Boston, they turn 
wholly beautiful. They no longer present that impos- 
ing array of mighty ships which they could show in 
the days of Consul Plancus, when the commerc^e of 
the world sought chiefly our port, yet the docks are 
still filled with the modester kinds of shipping, and if 
there is not that wilderness of spars and rigging which 
you see at New York, let us believe that there is an 
aspect of selection and refinement in the scene, so 
that one should describe it, not as a forest, but, less 
conventionally, as a gentleman's park of masts. The 
steamships of many coastwise freight lines gloom, 
with their black, capacious hulks, among the lighter 
sailing-craft, and among the white, green-shuttered 



140 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

passenger-boats ; and behind them those desperate 
and grimy sheds assume a picturesqueness, their sag 
ging roofs and crooked gables harmonizing agreeably 
with the shipping; and then growing up from all 
rises the mellow-tinted brick-built city, roof, and 
spire, and dome, — a fair and noble sight, indeed, 
and one not surpassed for a certain quiet and cleanly 
beauty by any that I know. 

Our friends lingered long upon this pretty pros- 
pect, and, as inland people of light heart and easy 
fancy will, the ladies made imagined voyages in each 
of the more notable vessels they passed, — all cheap 
and safe trips, occupying half a second apiece. Then 
they came forward to the bow, that they might not 
lose any part of the harbor's beauty and variety, and 
informed themselves of the names of each of the 
fortressed islands as they passed, and forgot them, 
being passed, so that to this day Aunt Melissa has 
the Fort Warren rebel prisoners languishing in Fort 
Independence. But they made sure of the air of 
soft repose that hung about each, of that exquisite 
military neatness which distinguishes them, and which 
went to Aunt Melissa's housekeeping heart, of the 
green, thick turf covering the escarpments, of the 
great guns loafing on the crests of the ramparts and 
looking out over the water sleepily, of the sentries 
pacing slowly up and down with their gleaming 
muskets. 

" I never see one of those fellows," says Cousin 
Frank, " without setting him to the music of that 
saddest and subtlest of Heine's poems. You know 
it, Lucy ; " and he repeats : — 



A day's pleasure. 141 

" Mein Herz, mein Herz is traurig, 
Doch lustig leuchtet der Mai ; 
Ich stehe gelehnt an der Linde, 
Hoch auf der alten Bastei. 



" Am alten grauen Thurme 
Ein Schilderhauschen steht ; 
Ein votiigercJckter Bursche 
Dort auf und nieder geht. 

" Er spielt mit seiner Flinte, 
Sie funkelt im Sonnenroth, 
Er prasentirt, und scUultert, — 
Ich wollt', er schosse mich todt.' 



" O ! " says Cousin Lucy, either because the^ 
poignant melancholy of the sentiment has suddenly 
pierced her, or because she does not quite under- 
stand the German, — you never can tell about 
women. While Frank smiles down upon her in 
this amiable doubt, their party is approached by the 
tipsy man who has been making the excursion so 
merry for the other passengers, in spite of the fact 
that there is very much to make one sad in him. 
He is an old man, sweltering in rusty black, a two 
days' gray beard, and a narrow-brimmed, livid silk 
hat, set well back upon the nape of his neck. He 
explains to our friends, as he does to every one 
whose acquaintance he makes, that he was in former 
days a seafaring man, and that he has brought his 
two little grandsons here to show them something 
about a ship ; and the poor old soul helplessly satur- 
ates his phrase with the rankest profanity. The 
boys are somewhat amused by their grandsire's state,. 
being no doubt familiar with it ; but a very grim- 



142 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

looking old lady who sits against tlie pilot-house, and 
keeps a sharp eye upon all three, and who is also 
doubtless familiar with the unhappy spectacle, seems 
not to find it a joke. Her stout matronly umbrella 
trembles in her hand when her husband draws near, 
and her eye flashes ; but he gives her as wide a 
berth as he can, returning her glare with a propi- 
tiatory drunken smile and a wink to the passengers to 
let them into the fun. In fact, he is full of humor 
in his tipsy way, and one after another falls the prey 
of his free sarcasm, which does not spare the boat or 
any feature of the excursion. He holds for a long 
time, by swiftly successive stories of his seafaring 
days, a very quiet gentleman, who dares neither 
laugh too loudly nor show indifference for fear of 
rousing that terrible wit at his expense, and finds his 
account in looking down at his boots. 

" Well, sir," says the deplorable old sinner, " Ave 
was forty days out from Liverpool, with a cargo of 
salt and ii-on, and we got caught on the Banks in a 
calm. 'Cap'n,' says 1, — I 'us sec'n' mate, — ' 's 
they any man aboard this ship knows how to pray ? ' 
' No,' says the cap'n ; ' blast yer prayers ! ' ' Well,' 
says I, ' cap'n, I'm no hand at all to pray, but I'm 
goin' to see if prayin' won't git us out 'n this.' And 
I down on my knees, and I made a first-class prayer ; 
and a breeze sprung up in a minute and carried us 
smack into Boston.'! 

At this bit of truculent burlesque the quiet man 
made a bold push, and walked away with a some- 
what sickened face, and as no one now intervened 



A day's pleasure. 143 

between them, the inebriate laid a familiar hand 
upon Cousin Frank's collar, and said with a wink at 
his late listener : " Looks like a lerigious man, don't 
he ? I guess I give him a good dose, if he does 
think himself the head-deacon of this boat." And 
he went on to state his ideas of religion, from which 
it seemed that he was a person of the most advanced 
thinkins, and believed in nothino- worth mentionino;. 

It is perhaps no worse for an Infidel to be drunk 
than a Christian, but my friend found this tipsy blas- 
phemei-'s case so revolting, that he went to the 
hand-bag, took out the empty claret-bottle, and seek- 
ing a solitary corner of the boat, cast the bottle into 
the water, and felt a thrill of uncommon self-approval 
as this scapegoat of all the wune at his grocer's 
bobbed oif upon the little waves. " Besides, it saves 
carrvino; the bottle home," he thouo;ht, not without 
a half-conscious reserve, that if his penitence Avere 
ever too much for him, he could easily abandon it. 
And without the reflection that the gate is always 
open behind him, who could consent to enter vipon 
any course of perfect behavior ? If good resolutions 
could not be broken, who would ever have the cour- 
age to form them ? Would it not be intolerable to 
be made as good as we ought to be ? Then, admir- 
able reader, thank Heaven even for your lapses, 
since it is so wholesome and savino- to be well 
ashamed of youi'self, from time to time. 

" What an outrage," said Cousin Frank, in the 
glow of virtue, as he rejoined the ladies, " that that 
tipsy rascal should be allowed to go on wuth his 



144 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

ribaldry. He seems to pervade the whole boat, and 
to subject everybody to his sway. He's a perfect 
despot to us helpless sober people, — I wouldn't 
openly disagree with him on any account. We 
ought to send a Round Robin to the captain, and 
ask him to put that religious liberal in irons during 
the rest of the voyage." 

In the mean time, however, the object of his 
indignation had used up all the conversible material 
in that part of the boat, and had deviously started 
for the other end. The elderly woman with the 
umbrella rose and followed him, somewhat wearily, 
and with a sadness that appeared more in her move- 
ment than in her face ; and as the two went down 
the cabin, did the comical affair look, after all, some- 
thing like tragedy ? My reader, who expects a little 
novelty in tragedy, and not these stale and common 
effects, will never think so. 

" You'll not pretend, Frank," says Lucy, " that 
in such an intellectual place as Boston a crowd as 
large as this can be got together, and no distin- 
guished literary people in it. I know there are some 
notables aboard : do point them out to me. Pretty 
near everybody has a literary look." 

" Why, that's what we call our Boston look. 
Cousin Lucy. You needn't have written anything 
to have it, — it's as general as tubercular consump- 
tion, and is the effect of our universal culture and 
habits of reading. I heard a New-Yorker say once 
that if you went into a corner grocery in Boston to 
buy a codfish, the man would ask you how you 



A day's pleasure. ■ 145 

liked ' Lucille,' whilst he was tying it up. No, no ; 
you mustn't be taken in by that literary look ; I'm 
afraid the real literary men don't always have it. 
But I do see a literary man aboard yonder," he 
added, craning his neck to one side, and then fur- 
tively pointing, — " the most literary man I ever 
knew, one of the most literary men that ever lived. 
His whole existence is really bound up in books ; he^ 
never talks of anything else, and never thinks of 
anything else, I believe. Look at him, — what kind 
and pleasant eyes he's got ! There, he sees me ! "' 
cries Cousin Frank, with a pleasurable excitem<?nt.. 
" How d'ye do? " he calls out. 

" O Cousin Frank, introduce us," sighs Lucy. 

" Not I ! He wouldn't thank me. He doesn't 
care for pretty girls outside of books ; he'd be afraid 
of 'em ; he's the bashfullest man alive, and all his 
heroines are fifty years old, at the least. But before 
I go any further, tell me solemnly, Lucy, you're not 
interviewino- me ? You're not ffoing; to write it to 
a New York newspaper ? No ? Well, I think it's 
best to ask, always. Our friend there — he's every- 
body's friend, if you mean nobody's enemy, by that, 
not even his own — is really what I say, — the most 
literary man I ever knew. He loves all epochs and 
phases of literature, but his passion is the Charles 
Lamb period and all Lamb's friends. He loves 
them as if they were living men ; and Lamb would 
have loved him if he could have known him. He 
speaks rapidly, and rather indistinctly, and when 
you meet him and say Good day, and you suppose he- 

10 



146 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

answers with something about the weather, ten to 
one he 's asking you wliat you think of HazHtt's 
essays on Shakespeare, or Leigh Hunt's Itahan Po- 
ets, or Lamb's roast pig, or Barry Cornwall's songs. 
He couldn't get by a bookstall without stopping — 
for half an hour, at any rate. He knows just when 
all the new books in town are to be published, and 
when each bookseller is to set his invoice of old 
English books. He has no particular address, but 
if you leave your card for him at any bookstore in 
Boston, he 's sure to get it within two days ; and in 
the summer-time you'>re ;apt to meet him on these 
excursions. Of course, he writes about books, and 
very tastefully and modestly ; there's hardly any of 
the brand-new immortal English poets, who die off 
so rapidly, but has had a good word from him ; but 
his heart is with the older fellows, from Chaucer 
down ; and, after the Chai'les Lamb epoch, I don't 
know whether he loves better the Elizabethan age 
or that of Queen Anne. Think of him making me 
stop the other day at a bookstall, and read through 
an essay out of the " Spectator ! " I did it all for 
love of him, though money couldn't have persuaded 
me that I had time ; and I'm always telling him lies, 
and pretending to be as well acquainted as he is with 
authors I hardly know by name, — he seems so 
fondly to expect it. He's really almost a disem- 
bodied spirit as concerns most mundane interests ; 
his soul is in literature, as a lover's in his mistress's 
beauty ; and in the next world, where, as the Swe- 
de nborgians believe, spirits seen at a distance appear 



A day's pleasure. 147 

.Ike the things they most resemble in disposition, as 
doves, hawks, goats, lambs, swine, and so on, I'm 
sure that I shall see his true and kindly soul in the 
guise of a noble old Folio, quaintly lettered across 
his back in old English text, Tom. J." 

While our friends talked and looked about them, 
a sudden change had come over the brightness and 
warmth of the day ; the blue heaven had turned a 
chilly gray, and the water looked harsh and cold. 
Now, too, they noted that they were drawing near a 
wooden pier built into the water, and that they had 
been winding about in a crooked channel between 
muddy shallows, and that their course was overrun 
with long, disheveled sea-weed. The shawls had 
been unstrapped, and the ladies made comfortable in 
them. 

" Ho for the beach ! " cried Cousin Frank, with a 
vehement show of enthusiasm. " Now, then, Aunt 
Melissa, prepare for the great enjoyment of the day. 
In a few moments we shall be of the elves 

' That on the sand with printless foot 
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him 
When he comes back.' 

Come ! we shall have three hours on the beach, and 
that will bring us well into the cool of the evening, 
and we can return by the last boat." 

" As to the cool of the evening," said Aunt 
Melissa, " I don't know. It's quite cool enough for 
comfort at present, and I'm sure that anything more 
wouldn't be wholesome. What's become of our 
beautiful weather ? " she asked, deeply plotting tc 
gain time. 



148 



SUBURBAISI SKETCHES. 



" It 's one of our Boston peculiarities, not to say 
merits," answered Frank, " which you must have 
noticed already, that we can get rid of a fine day 
sooner than any other region. While you're saying 
how lovely it is, a subtle change is Avrought, and 
under skies still blue and a sun still warm tlie keen 
spirit of the east wind pierces every nerve, and all 
the fine weather within you is chilled and extin- 
guished. The gray atmosphere follows, but tlie day 
first languishes in yourself. But for this, life in 
Boston would be insupportably perfect, if this is 
indeed a drawback. You'd find Bostonians to de- 
fend it, I dare say. But this isn't a regular east 
wind to-day ; it's merely our nearness to the sea." 

" I think, Franklin," said Aunt Melissa, " that we 
won't go down to the beach this afternoon," as if 
she had been there yesterday, and would go to-mor- 
row. " It 's too late in the day ; and it wouldn't be 
good for the child, I'm sure." 

" Well, aunty, it was you determined us to wait 
for the boat, and it 's your right to say whether we 
shall leave it or not. I'm very willing not to go 
ashore. I always find that, after working up to an 
object with great effort, it 's surpassingly sweet to 
leave it unaccomplished at last. Then it remains 
forever in the region of the ideal, amongst the songs 
that never were sung, the pictures that never were 
painted. Why, in fact, should we force this pleas- 
ure ? We've eaten our lunch, we've lost the warm 
heart of the day ; why should we poorly drag over 
to that damp and sullen beach, where we should find 



A day's pleasure. 149 

three hours very long, when by going back now we 
can keep intact that glorious image of a day by the 
sea which we've been cherishino; all summer ? You're 
right, Aunt Melissa ; we won't go ashore ; we will 
stay here, and respect our illusions." 

At heart, perhaps, Lucy did not quite like this 
retreat ; it was not in harmony with the youthful 
spirit of her sex, but she reflected that she could 
come again, — O beneficent cheat of Another Time, 
how much thou sparest us in our over-worked, over- 
enjoyed world ! — she was very comfortable where 
she was, in a seat commanding a perfect view for the 
return trip ; and she submitted without a murmur. 
Besides, now that the boat had drawn up to the pier, 
and discharged part of her passengers, and was wait- 
ing to take on others, Lucy was interested in a mass 
of fluttering dresses and wide-rimmed sti'aw hats 
that drew down toward the " Rose Standish," and 
gracefully thronged the pier, and prettily hesitated 
about, and finally came aboard with laughter and 
little false cries of terror, attended through all by the 
New England disproportion of that sex which is so 
foolish when it is silly. It was a large picnic party 
which had been spending the day upon the beach, as 
each of the ladies showed in her face, where, if the 
roses upon her cheeks were somewhat obscured by 
the imbrowning seaside sun, a bright pink had been 
compensatingly bestowed upon the point of her nose. 
A mysterious quiet fell upon them all when they 
were got aboard and had taken conspicuous places, 
which was accounted for presently when a loud shout 



150 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

was heard from the shore, and a man beside an am- 
bulant photographic machine was seen wildly waving 
his hat. It is impossible to resist a temptation of 
this kind, and our party all yielded, and posed them- 
selves in striking and characteristic attitudes, — even 
Aunt Melissa sharing the ambition to appear in a 
picture which she should never see, and the nurse 
coming out strong from the abeyance in which she 
had been held, and lifting the baby high into the air 
for a good likeness. The frantic gesticulator on the 
shore gave an impi'essive wave Avith both hands, took 
the cap from the instrument, turned his back, as pho- 
tographers always do, with that air of hiding their 
tears, for the brief space that seems so long, and 
then clapped on the cap again, while a great sigh of 
relief went up from the whole boat-load of passen- 
gers. They were taken. 

But the interval had been a luckless one for the 
" Rose Standish," and when she stirred her wheels, 
clouds of mud rose to the top of the water, and 
there was no responsive movement of the boat. She 
was aground in the fallino; tide. 

" There seems a pretty fair prospect of our spend- 
ing some time here, after all," said Frank, while the 
ladies, who had reluctantly given up the idea of stay- 
ing, were now in a quiver of impatience to be off. 
The picnic was shifted from side to side ; the engine 
groaned and tugged, Captain Miles Standish and his 
crew bestirred themselves vigorously, and at last the 
boat swung loose, and strode down the sea-weedy 
channels ; while our friends, who had already done 



A day's pleasure. 151 

the great sights of the harbor, now settled themselves 
to the enjoyment of its minor traits and beauties. 
Here and there they passed small parties on the 
shore, which, with their yachts anchored near, or 
their boats drawn up from the water, were cooking 
an out-door meal by a fire that burned bright red 
upon the sands in the late afternoon air. In such 
cases, people willingly indulge themselves in salut- 
ing whatever craft goes by, and the ladies of these 
small picnics, as they sat round the fires, kept up 
a great waving of handkerchiefs, and sometimes 
cheered the " Rose Standish," though I believe the 
Bostonians are ordinarily not a demonstrative race. 
Of course the large picnic on boai'd fluttered multi- 
tudinous handkerchiefs in response, both to these 
people ashore and to those who hailed them from 
vessels which they met. They did not refiise the 
politeness even to the passengers on a rival boat 
when she passed them, though at heart they must 
have felt some natural pangs at being passed. The 
water was peopled everywhere by all sorts of sail 
lagging slowly homeward in the light evening breeze ; 
and on some of the larger vessels there were family 
groups to be seen, and a graceful smoke, suggestive 
of supper, curled from the cook's galley. I suppose 
these ships wei'e chiefly coasting craft, of one kind 
or another, come from the Provinces at farthest ; but 
to the ignorance and the fancy of our friends, they 
arrived fi'om all remote and romantic parts of the 
world, — from India, from China, and from the South 
Seas, with cargoes of spices and gums and tropical 



152 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

fruits ; and I see no reason why one should ever 
deny himself the easy pleasure they felt in painting 
the unknown in such lively hues. The truth is, a 
strange ship, if you will let her, always brings you 
precious freight, always arrives from Wonderland 
under the command of Captain Sinbad. How like a 
beautiful sprite she looks afar off, as if she came from 
some finer and fairer world than ours ! Nay, we will 
not go out to meet her ; we will not go on board ; 
Captain Sinbad shall bring us the invoice of gold- 
dnst, slaves, and rocs' eggs to-night, and we will 
have some of the eggs for breakfast ; or if he never 
comes, are we not just as rich ? But I think these 
friends of ours got a yet keener pleasure out of the 
spectacle of a large and stately ship, that with all 
sails spread moved silently and steadily out toward 
the open sea. It is yet grander and sweeter to sail 
toward the unknown than to come from it ; and 
every vessel that leaves port has this destination, and 
will bear you thither if you will. 

" It may be that the gulf shall wash us down; 
It maj- be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew," 

absently murmured Lucy, looking on this beautiful 
apparition. 

" But I can't help thinking of Ulysses' cabin-boy, 
yonder," said Cousin Frank, after a pause ; " can 
you. Aunt Melissa?" 

" I don't understand what you're talking about, 
'Franklin," answered Aunt Melissa, somewhat se- 
verely. 



A day's pleasure. 153 

" Why, I mean that there is a poor wretch of a 
boy on board there, who's run away, and whose 
heart must be aching just now at the thought of the 
home he has left. I hope Ulysses will be good to 
him, and not swear at him for a day or two, or 
knock him about with a belaying-pin. Just about 
this time his mother, up in the country, is getting 
ready his supper, and wondering what's become of 
him, and torturing herself with hopes that break one 
by one ; and to-night when she goes up to his empty 
room, having tried to persuade herself that the tru- 
ant's come back and climbed in at the window " — 

"Why, Franklin, this isn't true, is it?" asks 
Aunt Melissa. 

" Well, no, let's pray Heaven it isn't, in this case. 
It's been true often enouo;h to be false for once." 

"What a great, ugly, black object a ship is ! " said 
Cousin Lucy. 

Slowly the city rose up against the distance, 
sharpening all its outlines, and filling in all its famil- 
iar details, — like a fact which one dreams is a 
dream, and which, as the mists of sleep break away, 
shows itself for reality. 

The air grows closer and warmer, — it is the 
breath of the hot and toil-worn land. 

The boat makes her way up through the shipping, 
seeks her landing, and presently rubs herself affec- 
tionately against the wharf The passengers quickly 
disperse themselves upon shore, dismissed each with 
an appropriate sarcasm by the tipsy man, who has 
had the means of keeping himself drunk throughout, 



154 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

and who now looks to the discharge of the boat's 
cargo. 

As our friends leave the wharf-house behind them, 
and straggle uneasily, and very conscious of sun- 
burn, up the now silent length of Pearl Street to 
seek the nearest horse-cars, they are aware of a 
curious fidgeting of the nurse, who flies from one 
side of the pavement to the other and violently shifts 
the baby from one arm to the other. 

" What's the matter ? " asks Frank ; but before 
the nurse can answer, " Thim little divils," he per- 
ceives that the whooping-coughers of the morning 
have taken the occasion to renew a pleasant ac- 
quaintance, and are surrounding the baby and nurse 
with an atmosphere of whooping-cough. 

" I say, friends ! we can't stand this, you know," 
says the anxious father. " We must part some time, 
and this is a favorable moment. Now I'll give you all 
this, if you don't come another step ! " and he emp- 
ties out to them, from the hand-bao;s he carries, 
the fragments of lunch which the frugal mind of 
Aunt Melissa had caused her to store there. Upon 
these the whooping-coughers hurl themselves in a 
body, and are soon left round the corner. Yet they 
would have been no disgrace to our party, whose 
appearance was now most disreputable : Frank and 
Lucy stalked ahead, with shawls dragging from their 
arms, the former loaded down with hand bao:s and 
the latter with India-rubbers ; Aunt Melissa came 
next under a burden of bloated umbrellas ; the nurse 
last, with her hat awry, and the baby a caricature of 




" Frank and Lucy stalked ahead, with shawls draj^'ging from their 
arms." See page 154. 



A day's pleasure. 155 

its morning trimness, in her embrace. A day's 
pleasure is so demoralizing, that no party can stana 
it, and come out neat and orderly. 

" Cousin Frank/' asked Lucy, awfully, " what if 
we should meet the Mayflowers now ? " — the May- 
flowers being a very ancient and noble Boston family 
whose acc[uaintance was the great pride and terror 
of our friends' lives. 

" I should cut them dead," said Frank, and 
scarcely spoke again till his party dragged slowly up 
the steps of their minute suburban villa. 

At the door his wife met them with a troubled and 
anxious face. 

" Calamities ? " asked Frank, desperately. 

" O, calamities upon calamities ! We've got a 
lost child in the kitchen," answered Mrs. Sallie. 

" O good heavens ! " cried her husband. " Adieu, 
my di'eams of repose, so desirable after the quantity 
of active enjoyment I've had ! Well, where is the 
lost child?" 



III. — The Evening. 

"Where is the lost child?" repeats Frank, des- 
perately. " Where have you got him ? " 

" In the kitchen." 

"Why in the kitchen? " 

" How's baby ? " demands Mrs. Sallie, with the 
incoherent suddenness of her sex, and running half- 
way down the steps to meet the nurse. " Um, um, 
um-m-m-m," sounds, which may stand for smothered 
kisses of rapture and thanksgiving that baby is not a 
lost child. " Has he been good, Lucy ? Take him 
off and give'him some cocoa, Mrs. O'Gonegal," she 
adds in her business-like way, and with a little push 
to the combined nurse and baby, while Lucy 
answers, " O beautiful ! " and from that moment, 
being warned through all her being by something in 
the other's tone, casts aside the matronly manner 
which she has worn during the day, and lapses into 
the comfortable irresponsibility of young-ladyhood. 

" What kind of a time did you have ? " 

" Splendid ! " answers Lucy. " Delightful, I 
think," she adds, as if she thought others might not 
think so. 

"I suppose you found Gloucester a quaint old 
place." 



A day's pleasure. 157 

" O," saj& Frank, " we didn't go to Gloucester ; 
" we found that the City Fathers had chartered the 
boat for the day, so we thought we'd go to Nahant." 

" Then you've seen your favorite Gardens of 
Maolis ! What in the world are they like ? " 

" Well ; we didn't see the Gardens of Maolis ; 
the Nahant boat was so crowded that we couldn't 
think of going on her, and so we decided we'd drive 
over to the Liverpool Wharf and go down to Nan- 
tasket Beach." 

" That was nice. I'm so glad on Aunt Melissa's 
account. It 's much better to see the ocean from a 
long beach than fi*om those Naliant rocks." 

" That's what J said. But, you know, when we 
got to the wharf the boat had just left." 

" You dont mean it ! Well, then, what under 
the canopy did you do ? " 

" Why, we sat down in the wharf-house, and 
waited from nine o'clock till half-past two for the 
next boat." 

" Well, I'm glad you didn't back out^ at any rate. 
You did show pluck, you poor things ! I hope you 
enjoyed the beach after you did get there." 

" Why," says Frank, looking down, " we never 
got there." 

" Never got there ! " gasps Mrs. Sallie. " Didn't 
you go down on the afternoon boat ? " 

" Yes." 

" Why didn't you get to the beach, then ? " 

" We didn't go ashore." 

" Well, that's liU you, Frank." 



158 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

" It 's a great deal more like Aunt Melissa," an- 
swers Frank. " The air felt so raw and chilly by 
the time we reached the pier, that she declared the 
baby would perish if it was taken to the beach. 
Besides, nothing would persuade her that Nantasket 
Beach was at all different from Liverpool Wharf." 

" Never mind, never mind ! " says Mrs. Sallie. 
" I don't wish to hear anything more. That's your 
idea of a day's pleasure, is it ? I call it a day's dis- 
grace, a day's miserable giving-up. There, go in, 
go in ; I'm ashamed of you all. Don't let the 
neighbors see you, for pity's sake. — We keep him 
in the kitchen," she continues, recurring to Frank's 
long-unanswered question concerning the lost child, 
" because he prefers it as being the room nearest to 
the closet where the cookies are. He 's taken ad- 
vantage of our sympathies to refuse everything but 
cookies." 

" I suppose that's one of the rights of lost child- 
hood," comments Frank, languidly ; " there's no 
law that can compel him to touch even cracker." 

" Well, you'd better go down and see what you 
can make of him. He's driven u% all wild." 

So Frank descends to the region now redolent of 
the preparing tea, and finds upon a chair, in the 
middle of the kitchen floor, a very forlorn little fig- 
ure of a boy, mutely munching a sweet-cake, while 
now and then a tear steals down his cheeks and 
moistens the grimy traces of former tears. He and 
baby are, in the mean time regarding each other with 
a steadfast glare, the cook and the nurse supporting 
baby in this rite of hospitalitv. 



A day's pleasure. 159 

•* Well, my little man," says his host, " how did 
you get here ? " 

The little man, perhaps because he is heartily sick 
of the question, is somewhat slow to answer that 
there was a fire ; and that he ran after the steamer ; 
and a girl found him and brought him up here. 

" And that's all the blessed thing you can get out 
of him," says cook ; and the lost boy looks as if he 
felt cook to be perfectly right. 

In spite of the well-meant endeavors of the house- 
hold to wash him and brvish him, he is still a dread- 
fully travel-stained little boy, and he is powdered in 
every secret crease and wrinkle by that dust of old 
Charlesbridge, of which we always speak with an 
air of affected disgust, and a feeling of ill-concealed 
pride in an abomination so strikingly and peculiai'ly 
our own. He looks very much as if he had been 
following fire-engines about the streets of our learned 
and pulverous suburb ever since he could Avalk, and 
he certainly seems to feel himself in trouble to a 
certain degree ; but there is easily imaginable in his 
bearing a conviction that after all the chief care is 
with others, and that, though unhappy, he is not 
responsible. The principal victim of his sorrows is 
also penetrated by this opinion, and after gazing 
forlornly upon him for a while, asks mechanically, 
" What's your name ? " 

" Freddy," is the laconic answer. 

"Freddy — ? " trying with an artful inflection tc 
lead him on to his surname. 

" Freddy," decidedly and conclusively. 



160 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

". O, bless me ! What's the name of the street 
your papa lives on ? " 

This problem is far too deep for Freddy, and he 
takes a bite of sweet-cake in sign that he does not 
think of solving it. Frank looks at him gloomily for 
a moment, and then determines that he can grapple 
with the difficulty more successfully after he has had 
tea. " Send up the supper, Bridget. I think, my 
dear," he says, after they liave sat down, " we'd 
better all question our lost child when we've fin- 
ished." 

So, when they have finished, they have him up in 
the sitting-room, and the inquisition begins. 

" Now, Freddy," his host says, with a cheerful air 
of lifelong friendship and confidence, " 3'ou know 
that everybody has got two names. Of course your 
first name is Freddy, and it 's a very pretty name. 
Well, I want you to think real hard, and then tell 
me what your other name is, so I can take you back 
to your mamma." 

At this allusion the child looks round on the circle 
of eager and compassionate faces, and begins to shed 
tears and to wring; all hearts. 

" What's your name ? " asks Frank, cheerfully, — 
" your other name, you know ? " 

" Freddy," sobbed the forlorn creature. 

" O good heaven ! this'll never do," groaned the 
chief inquisitor. " Now, Freddy, try not to cry. 
What is your papa's name, — Mr. — ? " with the 
leading inflection as before. 

" Papa," says Freddy. 




" They skirmish about him with every sort of query." See page 161. 



A day's pleasure. 161 

" O, that'll never do ! Not Mr. Papa? " 

" Yes," persists Freddy. 

" But, Freddy," interposes Mrs. Sallie, as her 
husband falls back baffled, " when ladies come to see 
your mamma, what do they call her ? Mrs. — ? " 
adopting Frank's alluring inflection. 

"Mrs. Mamma," answers Freddy, confirmed in 
his error by this course ; and a secret dismay pos- 
sesses his questioners. They skirmish about him 
with every sort of query ; they try to entrap him into 
some kind of revelation by apparently irrelevant 
remarks ; they plan ambuscades and surprises ; but 
Freddy looks vigilantly round upon them, and guards 
his personal history from every approach, and seems 
in every way so to have the best of it, that it is 
almost exasperating. 

" Kindness has proved futile," observes Frank,, 
" and I think we ought as a last resort, before yield- 
ing ourselves to despair, to use intimidation. Now, 
Fred," he says, with sudden and terrible severity, 
" what's your father's name ? " 

The hapless little soul is really moved to an effort 
of memory by this, and blubbers out something that 
proves in the end to resemble the family name, 
though for the present it is merely a puzzle of unin- 
telligible sounds." 

" Blackman ? " cries Aunt Melissa, catching des- 
perately at these sounds. 

On this, all the man and brother is roused in. 
Freddy's bosom, and he roars fiercely, " No I he- 
ain't a black man ! He's white ! " 
11 



162 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

" I give it up," says Frank, who has been looking 
for his hat. " I'm afraid we can't make anything 
out of him ; and I'll have to go and report the case 
to the police. But, put him to bed, do, Sallie ; he'., 
dropping with sleep." 

So he went out, of course supported morally by a 
sense of duty, but I am afraid also by a sense of ad- 
venture in some degree. It is not every day that, 
in so quiet a place as Charlesbridge, you can have a 
lost child cast upon your sympathies ; and I believe 
that when an appeal is not really agonizing, we like 
so well to have our sympathies touched, we favorites 
of the prosperous commonplace, that most of us 
would enter ^gerly into a pathetic case of this kind, 
even after a day's pleasure. Such was certainly the 
mood of my friend, and he unconsciously prepared 
himself for an equal interest on the part of the 
police ; but this was an error. The police heard his 
statement with all proper attention, and wrote it in 
full upon the station-slate, but they showed no feel- 
ing whatever, and behaved as if they valued a lost 
child no more than a child snug at home in his own 
crib. They said that no doubt his parents would be 
asking at the police-stations for him during the night, 
and, as if my friend would otherwise have thought 
of putting him into the street, they suggested that 
he should just keep the lost child till he was sent for. 
Modestly enough Frank proposed that they should 
make some inquiry for his parents, and was answered 
by the question whether they could take a man off his 
Deat^r that purpose ; and remembering that beats in 



A day's pleasure. 16b 

Charlesbridge were of such vastness that durino; his 
whole residence there he had never yet seen a police- 
man on his street, he was obliged to own to himself 
that his proposal was absurd. He felt the need of 
reinstating himself by something more sensible, and 
so he said he thought he would go down to the Port 
and leave word at the station there ; and the police' 
tacitly assenting to this he went. 

I who have sometimes hinted that the Square is 
not a centre of gayety, or a scene of the greatest 
activity by day, feel it right to say that it has some 
modest charms of its own on a summer's night, about 
the hour when Frank passed through it, when the 
post-office has just been shut, and when the differ- 
ent groups that haunt the place in front of the clos- 
ing shops have dwindled to the loimgers fit though 
few who will keep it well into the night, and may 
there be found, by the passenger on the last horse- 
car out from Boston, wrapt in a kind of social 
silence, and honorably attended by the policeman 
whose favored beat is in that neighborhood. They 
seem a feature of the bygone village life of Charles- 
bridge, and accord pleasantly with the town-pump 
and the public horse-trough, and the noble elm 
that by night droops its boughs so pensively, and 
probably dreams of its happy younger days when 
there were no canker-worms in the world. Some- 
times this choice company sits on the curbing that 
goes round the terrace at the elm-tree's foot, and 
then I envy every soul in it, — so tranquil it sfeems, 
so cool, so careless, so morrowless. I cannot see the 



164 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

faces of that luxurious society, but there I imagine 
is the local albino, and a certain blind man, who 
resorts thither much by day, and makes a strange 
kind of jest of his own, with a flicker of humor upon 
his sightless face, and a faith that others less unkindly 
treated by nature will be able to see the point appar- 
ently not always discernible to himself. Late at 
night I have a fancy that the darkness puts him on 
an equality with other wits, and that he enjoys his 
own brilliancy as well as any one. 

At the Port station Frank was pleased and soothed 
by the tranquil air of the policeman, who sat in his 
shirt-sleeves outside the door, and seemed to an- 
nounce, by his attitude of final disoccupation, that 
crimes and misdemeanors were no more. This 
officer at once showed a desirable interest in the 
case. He put on his blue coat that he might listen 
to the whole story in a. proper figure, and then he 
took down the main points on the slate, and said that 
they would send word round to the other stations 
in the city, and the boy's parents could hardly help 
hearincr of him that night. 

Returned home, Frank gave his news, and then 
he and Mrs. Sallie went up to look at the lost child 
as he slept. The sumptuous diet to which he had 
confined himself from the first seemed to agree with 
him perfectly, for he slept unbrokenly, and appar- 
ently without a consciousness of his woes. On a chair 
lay his clothes, in a dusty little pathetic heap ; tliey 
were well-kept clothes, except for the wrong his 
wanderings had done them, and they showed a 



A day's pleasure. 16c 

motherly care here and there, which it was not easy 
to look at with composure. The spectators of his sleep 
both thought of the curious chance that had thrown 
this little one into their charge, and considered that 
he was almost as completely a gift of the Unknown as 
if he had been following a steamer in another planet, 
and had thence dropped into their yard. His help- 
lessness in accounting for himself was as affecting as 
that of the sublimest metaphysician ; and no learned 
man, no superior intellect, no subtle inquirer among 
us lost children of the divine, forgotten home, could 
have been less able to say how or whence he came 
to be just where he found himself. We wander 
away and away ; the dust of the road-side gathers 
upon us ; and when some strange shelter receives us, 
we lie down to our sleep, inarticulate, and haunted 
with dreams of memory, or the memory of dreams, 
knowing scarcely more of the past than of the fu- 
ture. 

" What a strange world ! " sighed Mrs. Sallie ; 
and then, as this was a mood far too speculative for 
her, she recalled herself to practical life suddenly. 
" If we should have to adopt this child, Frank " — 

" Why, bless my soul, we're not obliged to adopt 
him ! Even a lost child can't demand that." 

" We shall adopt him, if they don't come for him. 
And now, I want to know " (Mrs. Sallie spoke as if 
the adoption had been effected) " whether we shall 
give him our name, or some other ? " 

"Well, I don't know. It's the first child I've 
ever adopted," said Frank ; " and upon my word, J 



166 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

can't say whether you have to give him a new name 
or not. In fact, if I'd thought of this affair of a 
name, I'd never have adopted him. It 's the greatest 
part of the burden, and if his father will only come 
for him, I'll give him up without a murmur." 

In the interval that followed the proposal of this 
alarming difficulty, and while he sat and waited 
vaguely for whatever should be going to happen 
next, Frank was not able to repress a sense of per- 
sonal resentment towards the little vagrant sleeping 
so carelessly there, though at the bottom of his 
heart, there was all imaginable tenderness for him. 
In the fantastic character which, to his weariness, 
the day's pleasure took on, it seemed an extraordi- 
nary unkindness of fate that this lost child should 
have been kept in reserve for him after all the rest ; 
and he had so small consciousness of bestowing 
shelter and charity, and so profound a feeling of 
having himself been turned out of house and home 
by some surprising and potent agency, that if the 
lost child had been a regiment of Fenians billeted 
upon him, it could not have oppressed him more. 
While he remained perplexed in this perverse senti- 
ment of invasion and dispossession, "Hark!" said 
Mrs. Sallie, " what's that ? " 

It was a noise of dragging and shuffling on the 
walk in front of the house, and a low, hoarse whis- 
pering. 

" I don't know," said Frank, " but from the kind 
of pleasure I've got out of it so far, I should say 
that this holiday was capable of an earthquake be 
fore midnight.'' 



A day's pleasure. 167 

" Listen ! " 

They listened, as they must, and heard the outer 
darkness rehearse a raucous dialogue between an 
unseen Bill and Jim, who were the more terrible 
to the imagination from being so realistically named, 
and who seemed to have in charge some nameless 
third person, a mute actor in the invisible scene. 
There was doubt, which he uttered, in the mind of 
Jim, whether they could get this silent comrade 
along much farther without carrying him ; and there 
was a growling assent from Bill that he was pretty 
far gone, that was a fact, and that maybe Jim had 
better go for the wagon ; then there were quick, re- 
treating steps ; and then there was a profound silence, 
in which the audience of this strange drama sat 
thrilled and speechless. The effect was not less 
dreadful when there rose a dull sound, as of a help- 
less body rubbing against the fence, and at last 
lowered heavily to the ground. 

" O ! " cried Mrs. Sallie. " Do go out and help. 
He's dying ! " 

But even as she spoke the noise of wheels was 
heard. A wagon stopped before the door ; there 
came a tugging and lifting, with a sound as of 
crunching gravel, and then a " There ! " of great 
relief. 

" Frank ! " said Mrs. Sallie very solemnly, " if 
you don't go out and help those men, I'll never for- 
give you." 

Really, the drama had grown very impressive ; \t 
was a mystery, to say the least ; and so it must re 



168 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

main fijrever, for when Frank, infected at last by Mrs. 
Sallie's faith in tragedy, opened the door and oiferea 
his tardy services, the wagon was driven rapidly 
away without reply. They never learned what it 
had all been ; and I think that if one actually 
honors mysteries, it is best not to look into them. 
How much finer, after all, if you have such a thing 
as this happen before your door at midnight, not to 
throw any light upon it ! Then your probable tipsy 
man cannot be proved other than a tragical presence, 
which you can match with any inscrutable creation 
of fiction ; and if you should ever come to write a 
romance, as one is very liable to do in this age, there 
is your unknown, a figure of strange and fearful 
interest, made to your hand, and capable of being 
used, in or out of the body, with a very gloomy 
effect. 

While our friends yet trembled with this sensation, 
quick steps ascended to their door, and then fol- 
lowed a sharp, anxious tug at the bell. 

" Ah ! " cried Frank, prophetically, " here's the 
father of our adopted son ; " and he opened the 
door. 

The gentleman_who appeared there could scarcely 
frame the question to which Frank replied so cheer- 
fully : " O yes ; he's here, and snug in bed, and fast 
asleep. Come up-stairs and look at him. Better let 
him be till morning, and then come after him," he 
added, as they looked down a moment on the little 
sleeper. 

" O no, I couldn't," said the father, con expres' 



A day's pleasure. 169 

sione; and then he told how he had heard of the 
child's whereabouts at the Port station, and had 
hurried to get him, and how his mother did not 
know he was found yet, and was almost wild about 
him. They had no idea how he had got lost, and 
his own blind story was the only tale of his adven- 
ture that ever became known. 

By this time his fatlier had got the child partly 
awake, and the two men were dressing him in men's 
clumsy fashion ; and finally they gave it up, and 
rolled him in a shawl. The father lifted the sliglit 
burden, and two small arms fell about his neck. The 
weary child slept again. 

" How has he behaved ? " asked the father. 

" Like a little hero," said Frank, " but he's been a 
cormorant for cookies. I think it right to tell you, 
in case he shouldn't be very brilliant to-morrow, 
that he wouldn't eat a bit of anvthing; else." 

The father said he was the life of their house ; 
and Frank said he knew how that was, — that he had 
a life of the house of his own ; and then the father 
thanked him very simply and touchingly, and with 
the decent New England self-restraint, Avhich is 
doubtless so much better than any sort of effusion. 
" S^y good-night to the gentleman, 'Freddy," he 
said at the door ; and Freddy with closed eyes mur- 
mured a good-night from far within the land of 
dreams, and then was borne away to the house out 
of which the life had wandered with his little feet. 

" I don't know, Sallie," said Frank, when he had 
given all the eagerly demanded particulars about the 



170 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

child's father, — "I don't know whether I should 
want many such holidays as this, in the course of the 
summer. On the whole, I think I'd better over- 
work myself and not take any relaxation, if I mean 
to live long. And yet I'm not sure that the day 's 
heen altogether a failure, though all our purposes Oi 
enjoyment have miscarried. I didn't plan to find a 
lost child here, when I got home, and I'm afraid I 
haven't had always the most Christian feeling towards 
him ; but he's really the saving grace of the affair ; 
and if this were a little comedy I had been playing, 
I should tui'n him to account with the jaded audi- 
ence, and advancing to the foot-lights, should say, 
with my hand on my waistcoat, and a neat bow, that 
although every hope of the day had been disap- 
pointed, and nothing I had meant to do had been 
done, yet the man who had ended at midnight by 
restoring a lost child to the arms of its father, must 
own that, in spite of adverse fortune, he had enjoyed 
A Day's Pleasure." 




A gaunt figure of forlorn and curious smartness." See page 171. 



A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 

It was long past tlie twilight hour, which has 
been already mentioned as so oppressive in suburban 
places, and it was even too late for visitors, when 
a resident, whom I shall briefly describe as a Con- 
tributor to the magazines, was startled by a ring at 
his door. As any thoughtful person would have done 
upon the like occasion, he ran over his acquaintance 
in his mind, speculating whether it were such or such 
a one, and dismissing the whole list of improbabili- 
ties, before he laid down the book he was reading, 
and answered the bell. When at last he did this, he 
was rewarded by the apparition of an utter stranger 
on his threshold, — a gaunt figure of forlorn and 
curious smartness towering far above him, that jerked 
him a nod of the head, and asked if Mr. Hapford lived 
there. The face Avliich the lamp-light revealed was 
remarkable for a harsh two days' growth of beard, 
and a single bloodshot eye ; yet it was not otherwise 
a sinister countenance, and there was something in 
the strange presence that appealed and touched. 
The contributor, revolving the facts vaguely in his 
mind, was not sure, after all, that it was not the 
man's clothes rather than his expression that soft- 
ened him toward the rugged visage : they were so 
tragically cheap, and the misery of helpless needle- 



172 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

women, and the poverty and ignorance- of the pur- 
chaser, were so apparent in their shabby newness, oi 
which they appeared still conscious enough to have 
led the way to the very window, in the Semitic 
quarter of the city, where they had lain ticketed, 
" This nobby suit for |15." 

But the stranger's manner put both his face and 
his clothes out of mind, and claimed a deeper inter- 
est when, being answered that the person for wliom 
he asked did not live there, he set his bristling lips 
hard together, and sighed heavily. 

" They told me," he said, in a hopeless way, 
" that he lived on this street, and I've been to every 
other house. I'm very anxious to find him, Cap'n," 

— the contributor, of course, had no claim to the 
title with which he was thus decorated, — " for I've 
a daughter livino- with him, and I want to see her ; 
I've just got .home from a two years' voyage, and " 

— there was a struggle of the Adam's-apple in the 
man's gaunt throat — "I find she's about all there is 
left of my family." 

How complex is every human motive ! This con- 
tributor had been lately thinking, whenever he 
turned the pages of some foolish traveller, — some 
empty prattler of Southern or Eastern lands, where 
all sensation M^as long ago exhausted, and the oxygen 
has perished from every sentiment, so has it been 
breathed and breathed again, — that nowadays the 
wise adventurer sat down beside his own register 
and waited for incidents to seek him out. It seemed 
to him that the cultivation of a patient and receptive 



A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 173 

Spirit was the sole condition needed to insure the 
occurrence of all manner of surprising facts within 
the range of one's own personal knowledge ; that 
not only the Greeks were at our doors, but the fairies 
and the genii, and all the people of romance, who 
had but to be hospitably treated in order to develop 
the deepest interest of fiction, and to become the 
characters of plots so ingenious that the most cun- 
ning invention were poor beside them. I myself am 
not so confident of this, and would rather trust Mr. 
Charles Reade, say, for my amusement than any 
chance combination of events. But I should be 
afraid to say how much his pride in the character of 
the stranger's sorrows, as proof of the correctness of 
his theory, prevailed Avith the contributor to ask him 
to come in and sit down ; though I hope that some 
abstract impulse of humanity, some compassionate 
and unselfish care for the man's misfortunes as mis- 
fortunes, was not wholly wanting. Indeed, the help- 
less simplicity with which he had confided his case 
might have touched a harder heart. " Thank you," 
said the poor fellow, after a moment's hesitation. 
"I believe I will come in. I've been on foot all 
day, and after such a long voyage it makes a man 
dreadfully sore to walk about so much. Perhaps 
you can think of a Mr. Hapford living somewhere in 
the neighborhood." 

He sat down, and, after a pondering silence, in 
which he had remained with his head fallen upon 
his breast, " My name is Jonathan Tinker," he said, 
with the unaffected air which had already impressed 



174 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

the contributor, and as if he felt that some form of 
introduction was necessary, "and the girl that I 
want to find is Julia Tinker." Then he added, r"^- 
suming the eventful personal history which the 
listener exulted, while he regretted, to hear : " Yoi;i 
see, I shipped first to Liverpool, and there I heard 
from my family ; and then I shipped again for Hong- 
Kong, and after that I never heard a word : I seemed 
to miss the letters everywhere. This morning, at 
four o'clock, I left my ship as soon as she had hauled 
into the dock, and hurried up home. The house 
was shut, and not a soul in it ; and I didn't know 
what to do, and I sat down on the doorstep to wait 
till the neighbors woke up, to ask them what had 
become of my family. And the first one come out 
he told me my wife had been dead a year and a half,* 
and the baby I'd never seen, with her ; and one of 
my boys was dead ; and he didn't know where the 
rest of the children was, but he'd heard two of the 
little ones was with a family in the city." 

The man mentioned these things with the half- 
apologetic air observable in a certain kind of Amer- 
icans when some accident obliges them to confess the 
infirmity of the natural feelings. They do not ask 
your sympathy, and you offer it quite at your own 
risk, with a chance of having it thrown back upon 
your hands. The contributor assumed the risk so 
far as to say, " Pretty rough ! " when the stranger 
paused ; and perhaps these homely words were best 
suited to reach the homely heart. The man's quiv- 
ering lips closed hard again, a kind of spasm passed 



A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 175 

over his dark face, and then two very small drops of 
brine shone upon his weather-worn cheeks. This 
demonstration, into which he had been surprised, 
seemed to stand for the passion of tears into which 
the emotional races fall at such times. He opened 
his lips with a' kind of dry click, and went on : — 

" I hunted about the whole forenoon in the city, 
and at last I found the children. I'd been gone so 
loner thev didn't know me, and somehow I thouo-ht 
the people they were with weren't over-glad I'd. 
turned up. Finally the oldest child told me that 
Julia was living with a Mr. Hapford on this street, 
and I started out here to-night to look her up. If I 
can find her, I'm all right. I can get the family to- 
gether, then, and start new." 

" It seems rather odd," mused the listener aloud, 
" that the neighbors let them break up so, and that 
they should all scatter as they, did." 

" Well, it ain't so curious as it seems, Cap'n. 
There was money for them at the owners', all the 
time ; I'd left part of my wages when I' sailed ; but 
they didn't know how to get at it, and what could 
a parcel of children do ? JuHa 's a good girl, and 
when I find her I'm all right." 

The writer could only repeat that there was no 
Mr. Hapford living on that street, and never had 
been, so far as he knew. Yet there might be such a 
person in the neighborhood ; and they would go out 
together, and ask at some of the houses about. But 
the stranger must first take a glass of wine ; for he 
looked used up. 



176 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

Tlie sailor awkwardly but civilly enough protested 
that he did not want to give so much trouble, but 
took the glass, and, as he put it to his lips, said for- 
mally, as if it were a toast or a kind of grace, " I 
hope I may have the opportunity of returning the 
compliment." The contributor thanked him; though, 
as he thought of all the circumstances of the case, 
and considered the cost at which the stranger had 
come to enjoy his politeness, he felt little eagerness 
to secure the return of the comphment at the same 
price, and added, with the consequence of another 
set phrase, " Not at all." But the thought had made 
him the more anxious to befriend the luckless soul 
fortune had cast in his way ; and so the two sallied 
out together, and rang door-bells wherever lights 
were still seen burning in the windows, and asked 
the astonished people who answered their summons 
whether any Mr. Hapford were known to live in the 
neio-hborhood. 

And although the search for this gentleman proved 
vain, the contributor could not feel that an expedi- 
tion which set familiar objects in such novel lights 
was altogether a failure. He entered so intimately 
into the cares and anxieties of his protSge, that at 
times he felt himself in some inexplicable sort a ship- 
mate of Jonathan Tinker, and almost personally a 
partner of his calamities. The estrangement of all 
things which takes place, within doors and without, 
about midnight may have helped to cast this doubt 
upon his identity ; — he seemed to be visiting now 
for the first time the streets and nei^rhborhoods near- 



A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 177 

est his own, and his feet stumbled over the accus- 
tomed walks. In his quality of houseless wanderer, 
and — so far as appeared to others — possibly 
worthless vagabond, he also got a new and instinic- 
tive effect upon the faces which, in his real character, 
he knew so well by their looks of neighborly greet- 
ing; and it is his belief that the first hospitable 
prompting of the human heart is to shut the door in 
the eyes of homeless strangers who present them- 
selves after eleven o'clock. By that time the ser- 
vants are all abed, and the gentleman of the house- 
answers the bell, and looks out with a loath and be- 
wildered face, which gradually changes to one of 
suspicion, and of wonder as to what those fellows 
can possibly want of him, till at last the prevailing 
expression is one of contrite desire to atone for the 
first reluctance by any sort of service. The con- 
tributor professes to have observed these changing 
phases in the visages of those whom he that night 
called from their dreams; or arrested in the act of 
going to bed ; and he drew the conclusion — very 
proper for his imaginable connection with the garrot- 
ing and other adventtirous brotherhoods — that the 
most flattering moment for knocking; on the head 
people who answer a late ring at night is either in 
their first selfish bewilderment, or their final self- 
abandonment to their better impulses. It does not 
seem to have occurred to him that he would himself 
have been a much more favorable subject for the 
predatory arts that any of his neighbors, if his ship- 
mate, the unknown companion of his researches foB' 

12 



178 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

Mr. Hapford, had been at all so minded. But the 
faith of the gaunt giant upon which he reposed was 
good, and the contributor continued to wander about 
with him in perfect safety. Not a soul among those 
they asked had ever heard of a Mr. Hapford, — far 
less of a Julia Tinker living with him. But they all 
listened to the contributor's explanation with interest 
and eventual sympathy ; and in truth, — briefly told, 
with a word now and then thrown in by Jonathan 
Tinker, who kept at the bottom of the steps, showing 
like a gloomy spectre in the night, or, in his gro- 
tesque length and gauntness, like the other's shadow 
cast there by the lamplight, — it was a story which 
could hardly fail to awaken pity. 

At last, after ringing several bells where there 
were no lights, in the mere wantonness of good-will, 
and going away before they could be answered (it 
would be entertaining to know what dreams they 
caused the sleepers within), there seemed to be 
nothing for it but to give up the search till morning, 
and go to the main street and wait for the last horse- 
car to the city. 

There, seated upon the curbstone, Jonathan 
Tinker, being plied with a few leading questions, 
told in hints and scraps the story of his hard life, 
which was at present that of a second mate, and had 
been that of a cabin-boy and of a seaman before the 
mast. The second mate's place he held to be the 
hardest aboard ship. You got only a few dollars 
more than the men, and you did not rank with the 
officers ; you took your meals alone, and in every- 



A ROMANCE OF EEAL LIFE. 179 

thing you belonged by yourself. The men did not 
respect you, and sometimes the captain abused you 
awfully before the passengers. The iiardest captain 
that Jonathan Tinker ever sailed with was Captain 
Gooding of the Cape. It had got to be so that no 
man would ship second mate under Captain Good- 
ing ; and Jonathan Tinker was with him only one 
voyage. When he had been home awhile, he saw 
an advertisement for a second mate, and he went 
round to the owners'. They had kept it secret who 
the captain was ; but there was Captain Gooding in 
the owners' office. " Why, here's the man, now, 
.that I want for a second mate," said he, when Jona- 
than Tinker entered ; " he knows me." — " Captain 
Gooding, I know you 'most too well to want to sail 
under you," answered Jonathan. " I might go if I 
hadn't been with you one voyage too many already." 

" And then the men ! " said Jonathan, " the men 
coming aboard drunk, and having to be pounded 
sober ! And the hardest of the fight falls on the 
second mate ! Why, there isn't an inch of me 
that hasn't been cut over or smashed into a jell. 
I've had three ribs broken ; I've got a scar from a 
knife on my cheek ; and I've been stabbed bad 
enough, half a dozen times, to lay me up." 

Here he gave a sort of desperate laugh, as if the 
notion of so much misery and such various mutila- 
tion were too grotesque not to be amusing. " Well, 
what can you do ? " he went on. " If you don't 
strike, the men think you're afraid of them ; and so 
you have to begin hard and go on hard. I always 



180 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

tell a man, ' Now, my man, I always begin with a 
man the way I mean to keep on. You do your duty 
and you're all right. But if you don't ' — Well, 
the men ain't Americans any more, — Dutch, Sj)an- 
iards, Chinese, Portuguee, — and it ain't like abusing 
a wliite man." 

Jonathan Tinker was plainly part of the liorrible 
tyranny which Ave all know exists on shipboard ; and 
his listener respected him the more that, though he 
had heart enough to be ashamed of it, he was too 
honest not to own it. 

Why did he still follow the sea? Because he did 
not know what else to do. When he was younger, 
he used to love it, but now he hated it. Yet there 
was not a prettier life in the world if you got to be 
captain. He used to hope for that once, but not 
now ; though he thought he could navigate a ship. 
Only let him get his family together again, and he 
would — yes, he would — try to do something ashore. 

No car had yet come in sight, and so the con- 
tributor suggested that they should walk to the car- 
office, and look in the " Directory," which is kept 
there, for the name of Hapford, in search of whom it 
had already been arranged that they should renew 
their acquaintance on the morrow. Jonathan Tinker, 
when they had reached the office, heard with con- 
stitutional phlegm that the name of the Hapford, 
for whom he inquired was not in the " Directory." 
" Never mind," said the other ; " come round to my 
house in the morning. We'll find him yet." So they 
parted with a shake of the hand, the second mate say< 



A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 181 

ing that he believed he should go down to the vessel 
and sleep aboard, — if he could sleep, — and murmur- 
ing at the last moment the hope of returning the 
compliment, while the other walked homeward, weary 
as to the flesh, but, in spite of his sympathy for Jona- 
than Tinker, very elate in spirit. The truth is, — 
and however disgraceful to human nature, let the 
truth still be told, — he had recurred to his primal 
satisfaction in the man as calamity capable of being 
used for such and such literary ends, and, while he 
pitied him, rejoiced in him as an episode of real life 
quite as striking and complete as anything in fiction. 
It was literature made to his hand. Nothing; could 
be better, he mused ; and once more he passed the 
details of the story in review, and beheld all those 
pictures which the poor fellow's artless words had so 
vividly conjured up : he saw him leaping ashore in 
the gray summer dawn as soon as the ship hauled 
into the dock, and making his way, with his vague 
sea-legs unaccustomed to the pavements, up through 
the silent and empty city streets ; he imagined the 
tumult of fear and hope which the sight of the man's 
home must have caused in him, and the benumbing 
shock of finding it blind and deaf to all his appeals ; 
he saw him sitting down upon what had been his 
own threshold, and waiting in a sort of bewildered 
patience till the neighbors should be awake, while 
the noises of the streets gradually arose, and the 
wheels began to rattle over the stones, and the milk- 
man and the ice-man came and went, and the wait- 
ing; fig;ure began to be stared at, and to challeng;e the 



182 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

curiosity of the passing policeman ; he fancied the 
opening of the neighbor's door, and the slow, cold 
understanding of the case ; the manner, whatever it 
was, in which the sailor was told that one year be- 
fore his wife had died, with her babe, and that his 
children were scattered, none knew where. As the 
contributor dwelt pityingly upon these things, but at 
the same time estimated their sesthetic value one by 
one, he drew near the head of his street, and found 
himself a few paces behind a boy slouching onward 
through the night, to whom he called out, adventur- 
ously, and with no real hope of information, — 

" Do you happen to know anybody on this street 
by the name of Hapford?" 

" Why no, not in this town," said the boy ; but 
he added that there was a street of the same name 
in a neighboring suburb, and that there was a Hap- 
ford living on it. 

" By Jove ! " thought the contributor, " this is 
more like literature than ever ; " and he hardly 
knew whether to be more provoked at his own stu- 
pidity in not thinking of a street of the same name in 
the next village, or delighted at the element of fatal- 
ity which the fact introduced into the story ; for 
Tinker, according to his own account, must have 
landed from the cars a few rods from the very door 
he was seeking, and so walked farther and farther 
from it every moment. He thought the case so 
curious, that he laid it briefly before the boy, who, 
however he might have been inwardly affected, was 
sufficiently true to the national traditions not t( 



A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 183 

make the smallest conceivable outward sign of con- 
cern in it. 

At home, however, the contributor related his 
adventures and the story of Tinker's life, adding the 
fact that he had just found out where Mr. Hapford 
lived. " It was the only touch wanting," said he ; 
" the whole thing is now perfect." 

" It's too perfect," was answered from a sad enthu- 
siasm. " Don't speak of it ! I can't take it in." 

" But the question is," said the contributor, peni- 
tently taking himself to task for forgetting the hero 
of these excellent misfortunes in his delight at their 
perfection, " how am I to sleep to-night, thinking of 
that poor soul's suspense and uncertainty ? Never 
mind, — I'll be up early, and run over and make 
sure that it is Tinker's Hapford, before he gets out 
here, and have a pleasant surprise for him. Would 
it not be a justifiable coup de thedtre to fetch his 
daughter here, and let her answer his ring at the 
door when he comes in the morning ? " 

This plan was discouraged. " No, no ; let them 
meet in their own way. Just take him to Hapford's 
house and leave him." 

" Very well. But he's too good a character to 
lose sight of. He's got to come back here and tell 
us what he intends to do." 

The birds, next morning, not having had the sec- 
ond mate on their minds either as an unhappy man 
or a most fortunate episode, but having slept long 
and soundly, were singing in a very sprightly way 
in the way-side trees ; and the sweetness of theii 



184 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

notes made the contributor's heart h'o-ht as he 
dimbed the hill and rang at Mr. Hapford's door. 

The door was opened by a young girl of fifteen or 
sixteen, whom he knew at a glance for the second 
mate's daughter, but of whom, for form's sake, he 
asked if there were a girl named Julia Tinker living 
there. 

" My name's Julia Tinker," answered the maid, 
who had rather a disappointing face. 

" Well," said the contributoi', " your father's got 
back from his Hong-Kong voyage." 

" Hong-Kong voyage ? " echoed the girl, with a 
stare of helpless inquiry, but no other visible emo- 
tion. 

" Yes. He had never heard of your mother's 
death. He came home yesterday morning, and was 
looking for you all day." 

Julia Tinker remained open-mouthed but mute ; 
and the other was puzzled at the Avant of feeling 
shown, which he could not account for even as a na- 
tional trait. " Perhaps there's some mistake," he 
said. 

'" There must be," answered Julia : " my father 
hasn't been to sea for a good many years. My 
father," she added, with a diffidence indescribably 
mingled with a sense of distinction, — " my father's 
in State's Prison. What kind of looking man was 
this ? " 

The contributor mechanically described him. 

Julia Tinker broke into a loud, hoarse laugh. 
'" Yes, it 's him, sure enough." And then, as if the 



A ROMANCE OF EEAL LIFE. 185 

joke were too good to keep : "Miss Hapford, Miss 
Hapford, father's got out. Do come here ! " she 
called into a back room. 

When Mrs. Hapford appeared, Julia fell hack, 
and, having deftly caught a fly on the door-post, 
occupied herself in plucking it to pieces, while she 
listened to the conversation of the others. 

" It 's all true enough," said Mrs. Hapford, when 
the writer had recounted the moving story of Jona- 
than Tinker, " so far as the death of his wife and 
baby goes. But he hasn't been to sea for a good 
many years, and he must have just come out of 
State's Prison, where he was put for bigamy. 
There's always two sides to a story, jon know ; but 
they say it broke his first wife's heart, and she died. 
His friends don't want him to find his children, and 
this girl especially." 

*' He's found his children in the city," said the 
contributor, gloomily, being at a loss what to do or 
say, in view of the wi'eck of his romance. 

" O, he's found 'em has lie ? " cried Julia, with 
heightened amusement. " Then he'll have me next, 
if I don't pack and go." 

" I'm very, very sorry," said the contributor, se- 
cretly resolved never to do another good deed, nc 
matter how temptingly the opportunity presented 
itself. " But you may depend he won't find out 
from me where you are. Of course I had no earthly 
reason for supposing his story was not true." 

" Of course," said kind-hearted Mrs. Hapford,. 
mingling a drop of lioney with the gall in the con^ 
tributor's soul, " you only did your duty." 



186 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

And indeed, as he turned away he did not fee 
altogether without compensation. However Jona- 
than Tinker had fallen in his esteem as a man, he 
had even risen as literature. The episode which 
had appeared so perfect in its pathetic phases did not 
seem less finished as a farce ; and this person, to 
whom all things of every-daj life presented them- 
selves in periods more or less rounded, and capable 
of use as facts or illustrations, could not but rejoice 
in these new incidents, as dramatically fashioned as 
the rest. It occurred to him that, wrought into a 
story, even better use might be made of the facts 
now than before, for they had developed questions 
of character and of human nature which could not 
fail to interest. The more he pondered upon his 
acquaintance with Jonathan Tinker, the more fasci- 
nating the erring mariner became, in his complex 
truth and falsehood, his delicately blending shades of 
artifice and naivete. He must, it was felt, have be- 
lieved to a certain point in his own inventions : nay, 
starting with that groundwork of truth, — the fact 
that his wife was really dead, and that he had not 
seen his family for two years, — why should he not 
place implicit faith in all the fictions reared upon it ? 
It was probable that he felt a real sorrow for her 
loss, and that he found a fantastic consolation in de- 
picting the circumstances of her death so that they 
should look like his inevitable misfortunes rather 
than his faults. He might well have repented his 
offense during those two years of prison ; and why 
should he not now cast their dreariness and shame 



A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 187 

out of his memory, and replace them with the free- 
dom and adventure of a two years' voyage to China, 
— so probable, in all respects, that the fact should 
appear an impossible nightmare ? In the experi- 
ences of his life he had abundant material to furnish 
forth the facts of such a voyage, and in the weari- 
ness and lassitude that should follow a day's walking 
equally after a two years' voyage and two years' 
imprisonment, he had as much physical proof in 
favor of one hypothesis as the other. It was doubt- 
less true, also, as he said, that he had gone to his 
house at dawn, and sat down on the threshold of his 
ruined home ; and perhaps he felt the desire he had 
expressed to see his daughter, with a purpose of be- 
ginning life anew ; and it may have cost him a veri- 
table pang when he found that his little ones did not 
know him. All the sentiments of the situation were 
such as might persuade a lively fancy of the truth 
of its own inventions ; and as he heard these contin- 
ually repeated by the contributor in their search for 
Mr. Hapford, they must have acquired an objective 
force and repute scarcely to be resisted. At the 
same time, there were touches of nature throughout 
Jonathan Tinker's narrative which could not fail to 
take the faith of another. The contributor, in re- 
viewing it, thought it particularly charming that his 
mariner had not overdrawn himself, or attempted to 
paint his character otherwise than as it probably was ; 
that he had shown his ideas and practices of life to 
be those of a second mate, nor more nor less, with- 
out the gloss of regret or the pretenses to refine- 



188 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

ment that might be pleasing to the supposed philan- 
thropist with whom he had fallen in. Captain 
Gooding was of course a true portrait; and there 
was nothing in Jonathan Tinker's statement of the 
relations of a second mate to his superiors and his 
inferiors which did not agree perfectly with what the 
contributor had just read in "Two Years before the 
Mast," — a book which had possibly cast its glamour 
upon the adventure. He admired also the just and 
perfectly characteristic air of grief in the bereaved 
husband and father, — those occasional escapes from 
the sense of loss into a brief hilarity and forgetful- 
ness, and those relapses into the hovering gloom, 
which every one has observed in this poor, crazy 
human nature when oppressed by sorrow, and which 
it would have been hard to simulate. But, above 
all, he exulted in that supreme stroke of the imagi- 
nation given by the second mate when, at parting, 
he said he believed he would go down and sleep on 
board the vessel. In view of this, the State's 
Prison theory almost appeared a malign and foolish 
scandal. 

Yet even if this theory were correct, was the 
second mate wholly answerable for beginning his 
life again with the imposture he had practiced ? 
The contributor had either so fallen in love with the 
literary advantages of his forlorn deceiver that he 
would see no moral obliquity in him, or he had 
touched a subtler verity at last in pondering the 
affair. It seemed now no longer a farce, but had a 
pathos which, though very different from that of its 



A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE. 189 

first aspect, was hardly less tragical. Knowing with 
what coldness, or, at the best, uncandor, he (repre- 
senting Society in its attitude toward convicted Er* 
ror) would have met the fact had it been owned to 
him at first, he had not virtue enough to condemn 
the illusory stranger, who must have been helpless to 
make at once evident any repentance he felt or good 
purpose he cherished. Was it not one of the saddest 
consequences of the man's past, — a dark necessity 
of misdoing, — that, even with the best will in the 
world to retrieve himself, his first endeavor must 
hivolve a wrong? Might he not, indeed, be con- 
sidered a martyr, in some sort, to his own admirable 
impulses ? I can see clearly enough where the con- 
tributor was astray in this reasoning, but I can also 
understand how one accustomed to value realities 
only as they resembled fables should be won with 
such pensive sophistry ; and I can certainly sympa- 
thize with his feeling that the mariner's failure to 
reappear according to appointment added its final 
and most agreeable charm to the whole affair, and 
completed the mystery from which the man emerged 
and which swallowed him up again. 



SCENE. 

On that loveliest autumn morning, the swollen 
tide had spread over all the russet levels, and 
gleamed in the sunlight a mile away. As the con- 
tributor moved onward down the street, luminous 
on either hand with crimsoning and yellowing ma- 
ples, he was so filled with the tender serenity of 
the scene, as not to be troubled by the spectacle of 
small Irish houses standing miserably about on the 
flats ankle deep, as it were, in little pools of the tide, 
or to be aware at first, of a strange stir of people 
upon tlie streets : a fluttering to and fro and lively 
encounter and separation of groups of bareheaded 
women, a flying of children through the broken 
fences of the neighborhood, and across the vacant 
lots on which the insulted sign-boards forbade them 
to trespass ; a sluggish movement of men through 
all, and a pause of different vehicles along the side- 
walks. When a sense of these facts had penetrated 
his enjoyment, he asked a matron whose snowy arms, 
freshly taken from the wash-tub, were folded across 
a mighty chest, " What is the matter ? " 

" A girl drowned herself, sir-r-r, over there on the 
flats, last Saturday, and they're looking for her." 

" It was the best thing she could do," said another 
matron grimly. 



SCENE. 191 

Upon this answer that literary, soul fell at once to 
patching himself up a romantic story for the suicide, 
after the pitiful fashion of this fiction-ridden age, 
when we must relate everything we see to sonlething 
we have read. He was the less to blame for it, be- 
cause he could not help it ; but certainly he is not to 
be praised for his associations with the tragic fact 
brought to his notice. Nothino; could have been 
more trite or obvious, and he felt his intellectual 
poverty so keenly that he might almost have believed 
his discomfort a sympathy for the girl who had 
drowned herself last Saturday. But of course, this 
could not be, for he had but lately been thinking 
what a very tiresome figure to the imagination the 
Fallen Woman had become. As a fact of Chris- 
tian civilization, she was a spectacle to wring one's 
heart, he owned ; but he wished she were well out 
of the romances, and it really seemed a fatality 
that she should be the principal personage of this 
little scene. The preparation for it, whatever it 
was to be, was so deliberate, and the reality had so 
slight relation to the French roofs and modern im- 
provements of the comfortable Charlesbridge which 
he knew, that he could not consider himself other 
than as a spectator awaiting some entertainment, 
with a faint inclination to be critical. 

In the mean time there passed through the mot- 
ley crowd, not so much a cry as a sensation of 
" They've found her, they've found her ! " and then 
the one teri'ible picturesque fact, " She was stand- 
ing upright ! " 



192 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

Upon this there was wilder and wilder elamoi 
among the people, dropping by degrees and almost 
dying away, before a flight of boys came down the 
street with the tidings, " They are bringing her — 
bringing her in a wagon." 

The contributor knew that she whom they were 
bringing in the wagon, had had the poetry of love 
to her dismal and otherwise squalid death ; but the 
history was of fancy, not of fact in his mind. Of 
course, he reflected, her lot must have been obscure 
and hard ; the aspect of those concerned about her 
death implied that. But of her hopes and her fears, 
who could tell him anything ? To be sure he could 
imagine the lovers, and how they first met, and 
where, and who he was that was doomed to work 
her shame and death ; but here his fancy came upon 
something coarse and common : a man of her own 
race and grade, handsome after that manner of 
beauty which is so much more hateful than ugliness 
is ; or, worse still, another kind of man whose deceit 
must have been subtler and wickeder ; but whatever 
the person, a presence defiant of sympathy or even 
interest, and simply horrible. Then there were the 
details of- the affair, in great degree common to all 
love affairs, and not varying so widely in any con- 
dition of life ; for the passion which is so rich and 
infinite to those within its charm, is apt to seem a 
little tedious and monotonous in its character, and 
poor in resources to the cold looker-on. 

Then, finally, there was the crazy purpose and its 
fulfillment : the headlong plunge from bank or 



SCENE. 103 

bridge ; the eddy, and the bubbles on the current 
that calmed itself above the suicide ; the tide that 
rose and stretched itself abroad in the sunshine, 
carrying hither and thither the burden with which it 
knew not what to do ; the arrest, as by some ghastly 
caprice of fate, of the dead girl, in that upright pos- 
ture, in which she should meet the quest for her, as 
it were defiantly. 

And now they were bringing her in a wagon. 

Involuntarily all stood aside, and waited till the 
funeral car, which they saAv, should come up toward 
them through the long vista of the maple-shaded 
street, a noiseless riot stirrincr the legs and arms of 
the boys into frantic demonstration, while the women 
remained quiet Avith arms folded or akimbo. Before 
and behind the wagon, driven slowly, went a guard 
of rao:o;ed urchins, while on the raised seat above sat 
two Americans, unperturl)ed by anything, and con- 
cerned merely with the business of the affair. 

The vehicle was a grocer's cart which had per- 
haps been pressed into the service ; and inevitably 
the contributor thought of 2enobia, and of Miles 
Coverdale's belief that if she could have foreboded 
all the post-mortem ugliness and grotesqueness of 
suicide, she never would have drowned herself. 
This girl, too, had doubtless had her own ideas of 
the effect that her death was to make, her convic- 
tion that it was to wring one heart, at least, and to 
strike awe and pity to every other ; and her woman's 
soul must have been shocked from death could she 
13 



194 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

have known in wliat a ghastly comedy the body she 
put off Avas to play a part. 

In the bottom of the cart lay something long and 
straight and terrible, covered with a red shawl that 
drooped over the end of the wagon ; and on this 
thing were piled the baskets in which the grocers had 
delivered their orders for sugar and flour, and coffee 
and tea. As the cart jolted through their lines, the 
boys could no longer be restrained ; they broke out 
with wild yells, and danced madly about it, while 
the red shawl hangino; from the rigid feet nodded to 
their frantic mirth ; and the sun dropped its light 
through the maples and shone bright upon the flooded 
flats. 



JUBILEE DAYS. 

I BELTEYE I liave no crood reason for iiicliulinc;; 
amono; tliese suburban sketches my recollections of 
the Peace Jubilee, celebrated by a monster musical 
entertainment at Boston, in June, 1869 ; and I 
do not know if it will serve as excuse for their 
intrusion to say that the exhibition was not urban 
in character, and that I attended it in a feeling of 
curiosity and amusement which the Bostonians did 
not seem to feel, and which I suspect was a strictly 
suburban if not rural sentiment. 

I thought, on that Tuesday morning, as our horse- 
car drew near the Lono- Brido;e, and we saw the Col- 
iseum spectral through the rain, that Boston was 
going to show people representing other parts of the 
country her Notion of weather. I looked forward 
to a forenoon of clammy warmth, and an afternoon 
of clammy cold and of east wind, with a misty night- 
fall soaking men to the bones. But the day really 
turned out well enough ; it was showery, but not 
shrewish, and it smiled pleasantly at sunset, as if 
content with the opening ceremonies of the Great 
Peace Jubilee. 

The city, as we entered it, gave due token of ex- 
citement, and we felt the celebration even in the 



196 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

air, which had a hoHday quality very different from 
that of ordinary workday air. The crowds filled the 
decorous streets, and the trim pathways of the Com- 
mon and the Public Garden, and flowed in an orderly 
course towards the vast edifice on the Back Bay, pre- 
senting the interesting points which always distinguish 
a crowd come to town from a city crowd. You get so 
used to the Boston face and the Boston dress, that a 
coat from New York or a visage from Chicago is at 
once conspicuous to you ; and in these people there 
was not only this sti'angenecs, but the diflfei'ent oddi- 
ties that lurk in out-of-way corners of society every- 
where had started suddenly into notice. Long-haired 
men, popularly supposed to have perished with the 
institution of slavery, appeared before me, and men 
with various causes and manias looking from their 
wild eyes confronted each other, let alone such 
charlatans as had clothed themselves quaintly or 
grotesquely to add a charm to the virtue of what- 
ever nostrum they peddled. It was, however, for 
the most part, a remarkably well-dressed crowd ; 
and therein it probably differed more than in any 
other respect from the crowd which a holiday would 
have assembled in former times. There was little 
rusticity to be noted anywhere, and the uncouthness 
which has already disappeared from the national face 
seemed to be passing from the national wardrobe. 
Nearly all the visitors seemed to be Americans, but 
neither the Yankee type nor the Hoosier was to be 
found. They were apparently very happy, too ; the 
ancestral solemnity of the race that amuses itself 



JUBILEE DAYS. 197 

sadly was not to be seen in them, and, if they were 
not making it a duty to be gay, they were really 
taking their pleasure in a cheerful spirit. 

There was, in fact, something in the sight of the 
Coliseum, as we approached it, which was a sufficient 
cause of elation to whoever is buoyed up by the 
flutter of brio-ht flao;s, and the movement in and 
about holiday booths, as I think we all are apt to be. 
One may not have the stomach of happier days for 
the swing or the whirligig ; he may not drink soda- 
water intemperately ; pop-corn may not tempt him, 
nor tropical fruits allure ; but he beholds them with- 
out gloom, — nay, a grin inevitably lights up his 
countenance at the sio;ht of a great show of these 
amusements and refreshments. And any Bostonian 
might have felt proud that morning that his city did 
not hide the light of her mercantile merit under a 
bushel, but blazoned it about on the booths and walls 
in every variety of printed and painted advertise- 
ment. To the mere aesthetic observer, these vast 
placards gave the delight of brilliant color, and 
blended prettily enough in effect with the flags ; and 
at flrst glance I received quite as much pleasure 
from the frescoes that advised me where to buy my 
summer clothing, as from any bunting I saw. 

I had the good fortune on the morning of this first 
Jubilee day to vicAv the interior of the Coliseum 
when there was scarcely anybody there, — a trifle 
of ten thousand singers at one end, and a few thou- 
sand other people scattered about over the wide 
expanses of parquet and galleries. The decorations 



198 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

within, as without, were a pleasure to the eyes that 
love gayety of color ; and the interior was certainly 
magnificent, with those long lines of white and blue 
drapery roofing the balconies, the slim, lofty columns 
festooned with flags and drooping banners, the arms 
of the States decking the fronts of the galleries, and 
the arabesques of painted muslin everywhere. I do 
not know that my taste concerned itself with the 
decorations, or that I have any taste in such things ; 
but I testify that these tints and draperies gave no 
small part of the comfort of being where all things 
conspired for one's pleasure. The airy amplitude 
of the building, the perfect order and the perfect 
freedom of movement, the ease of access and exit, 
the completeness of the arrangements that in the 
afternoon gave all of us thirty thousand spectators a 
chance to behold the great spectacle as well as to 
hear the music, were felt, I am sure, as personal 
favors by every one. These minor particulars, in 
fact, served greatly to assist you in identifying your- 
self, when the vast hive swarmed with humanity, 
and you became a mere sentient atom of the mass. 

It was rumored in the mornino; that the cere- 
monies were to begin with prayer by a hundred 
ministers, but I missed this striking feature of the 
exhibition, for I did not arrive in the afternoon till 
the last speech Avas being made by a gentleman 
whom I saw gesticulating effectively, and whom I 
suppose to have been intelligible to a matter of 
twenty thousand people in his vicinity, but who was 
to me, of the remote, outlying thirty thousand, a 




The spectacle as we beheltl it." See page 199. 



JUBILEE DAYS. 199 

voice merely. One word only I caught, and I 
report it here that posterity may know as much as 
we thirty thousand contemporaries did of 

THE president's SPEECH. 

(jsen»ationS) ....,,, 

. (^cheers.^ . . . refinement .... 
(^great applause.^ 



I do not know if I shall he ahle to give an idea of 
the immensity of this scene ; but if such a reader as 
has the dimensions of the Coliseum accurately fixed 
in his mind will, in imagination, densely hide all that 
interminable array of benching in the parquet and 
the galleries and the slopes at either end of the edi- 
fice with human heads, showing here crowns, there 
occiputs, and yonder faces, he will perhaps have 
some notion of the spectacle as we beheld it from 
the northern hill-side. Some thousands of heads 
nearest were recognizable as attached by the usual 
neck to the customary human body, but for the rest, 
we seemed to have entered a world of cherubim. 
Especially did the multitudinous singers seated far 
opposite encourage this illusion ; and their fluttering 
fans and handkerchiefs wonderfully mocked the 
movement of those cravat-like pinions which the 
fancy attributed to them. They rose or sank at the 
wave of the director's baton ; and still looked like 
an innumerable flock of cherubs drifting over some 
slope of Paradise, or settling upon it, — if cherubs 
can settle. 



200 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

The immensity was quite as striking to the mind 
as to the eye, and an absolute democracy was appre- 
ciable in it. Not only did all artificial distinctions 
cease, but those of nature were practically obliter- 
ated, and you felt for once the full meaning of unan- 
imity. No one was at a disadvantage ; one was as 
wise, as good, as handsome as another. In most 
public assemblages, the foolish eye roves in search 
of the vanity of female beauty, and rests upon some 
lovely visage, or pretty figure ; but here it seemed to 
matter nothing whether ladies were well or ill-look- 
ing ; and one might have been perfectly ascetic 
without self-denial. A blue eye or a black, — what 
of it ? A mass of blonde or chestnut hair, this sort 
of walking-dress or that, — you might note the 
difference casually in a few hundred around you; 
but a sense of those myriads of other eyes and 
chignons and walking-dresses absorbed the impres- 
sion in an instant, and left a dim, strange sense of 
loss, as if all women had suddenly become Woman. 
For the time, one would have been preposterously 
conceited to have felt his littleness in that crowd ; 
you never thought of yourself in an individual 
capacity at all. It was as if you were a private in an 
ai'my, or a very ordinary billow of the sea, feeling 
the battle or the storm, in a collective sort of way, 
but unable to distinguish your sensations from those 
of the mass. If a rafter had fallen and crushed you 
ind your unimportant row of people, you could 
scarcely have regarded it as a personal calamity, but 
might have found it disagreeable as a shock to that 



JUBILEE DAYS. 201 

great body of humanity. Recall, then, how aston- 
ished you were to be recognized by some one, and 
to have your hand shaken in your individual charac- 
ter of Smith. " Smith ? My dear What's-your- 
name, I am for the present the fifty-thousandth part 
of an enormous emotion! " 

It was as difficult to distribute the various facts of 
the whole effect, as to identify one's self. I had only 
a public and general consciousness of the delight 
given by the harmony of hues in the parquet below ; 
and concernino; the orchestra I had at first no dis- 
tinct impression save of the three hundred and thirty 
violin-bows held erect like standing wheat at one 
motion of the director's wand, and then fallino; as if 
with the next he swept them down. Afterwards 
files of men with horns, and other files of men with 
drums and cymbals, discovered themselves ; while far 
above all, certain laborious figures pumped or ground 
with incessant obeisance at the apparatus supplying 
the oro;an with wind. 

What helped, more than anything else, to restore 
you your dispersed and wandering individuality was 
the singing of Parepa-Rosa, as she triumphed over 
the harmonious rivalry of the orchestra. There was 
something in the generous amplitude and robust 
cheerfulness of this great artist that accorded well with 
the ideal of the occasion ; she was in herself a great 
musical festival ; and one felt, as she floated down 
the stage with her far- spreading white draperies, and 
swept the audience a colossal courtesy, that here was 
the embodied genius of the Jubilee. I do not trust 



202 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

myself to speak particularly of her singing, for I 
have the natural modesty of people who know noth- 
ing about music, and I have not at command the 
phraseology of those who pretend to understand it ; 
but I say that lier voice filled the whole edifice with 
delicious melody, that it soothed and composed and 
utterly enchanted, that, though two hundred violins 
accompanied her, the greater sweetness of her note 
prevailed over all, like a miglity will commanding 
many. What a sublime ovation for her Avhen a 
hundred thousand hands thundered their acclaim ! 
A victorious general, an accepted lover, a successful 
young author, — these know a measure of bliss, I 
dare say ; but in one throb, the singer's heart, as it 
leaps in exultation at the loud delight of her applau- 
sive thousands, must out-enjoy them all. Let me 
lay these poor little artificial flowers of rhetoric at 
the feet of the divine singer, as a faint token of grat- 
itude and eloquent intention. 

When Parepa (or Prepper, as I have heard her 
name popularly pronounced) had sung, the revived 
consciousness of an individual life rose in rebellion 
against the oppression of that dominant vastness. In 
fact, human nature can stand only so much of any 
one thing. To a certain degree you accept and 
conceive of facts truthfully, but beyond this a mere 
fantasticality rules ; and having got enough of grand- 
eur, the senses played themselves false. That array 
of fluttering and tuning people on the southern slope 
began to look minute, like the myriad heads assem- 
bled in the infinitesimal photograph which you view 



JUBILEE DAYS. 203 

through one of those Httle half-inch 'lorgnettes ; and 
you had the satisfaction of knowing that to any lovely 
infinitesimality yonder you showed no bigger than a 
carpet-tack. The whole performance now seemed 
to be worked by those tireless figures pumping at 
the organ, in obedience to signals from a very alert 
figure on the platform below. The choral and 
orchestral thousands sang and piped and played ; 
and at a given point in the scena from Verdi, a hun- 
dred fairies in red shirts marched down throuirh the 
sombre mass of puppets and beat upon as many 
invisible anvils. 

This was the stroke of anti-climax ; and the drolli 
sound of those anvils, so far above all the voices and 
instruments in its pitch, thoroughly disillusioned you 
and restored you finally to your proper entity and 
proportions. It was the great error of the great 
Jubilee, and where almost everything else was noble 
and impressive, — where the direction was faultless, 
and the singing and instrumentation as perfectly con- 
trolled as if they were the result of one volition, — 
this anvil-beating was alone ignoble and discordant, 
— trivial and huge merely. Not even the artillery 
accompaniment, in which the cannon were made to 
pronounce words of two syllables, was so bad. 

The dimensions of this sketch bear so little pro- 
portion to those of the Jubilee, that I must perforce 
leave most of its features unnoticed ; but I wish to 
express the sense of enjoyment which prevailed 
(whenever the anvils were not beaten) over every 
other feeling, even over wonder. To the ear as to. 



204 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

the eye it was a delight, and it was an assured suc- 
cess in the popular affections from the performance 
of the first piece. For my own part, if one pleasur- 
able sensation, besides that received from Parepa's 
sino-inof, distino-uished itself from the rest, it was that 
given by the performance of the exquisite Coronation 
March from Meyerbeer's " Prophet ; " but I say this 
under protest of the pleasure taken in the choral 
rendering of the " Star-Spangled Banner." Closely 
allying themselves to these great raptures were the 
minor joys of wandering freely about from point to 
point, of receiving fresh sensations from the varying 
lights and aspects in which the novel scene presented 
itself with its strange fascinations, and of noting, 
half consciously, the incessant movement of the 
crowd as it revealed itself in changing effects of 
color. Then the gay tumult of the fifteen minutes 
of intermission between the parts, when all rose with 
a susurrus of innumerable silks, and the thousands 
of pretty singers fluttered about, and gossiped trem- 
ulously and delightedly over the glory of the per- 
formance, revealing themselves as charming feminine 
personalities, each with her share in the difficulty 
and the achievement, each with her pique or pride, 
and each her something to tell her friend of the con- 
duct, agreeable or displeasing, of some particular 
him ! Even the quick dispersion of the mass at the 
close Avas a marvel of orderliness and grace, as the 
melting and separating parts, falling asunder, radi- 
ated from the centi-e, and flowed and rippled rapidly 
away, and left the great hall empty and bare at 
last. 



JUBILEE DAYS. 205 

And as you emerged from the building, what 
bizarre and perverse feeh'ng was that you knew ? 
Something as if all-out-doors were cramped and 
small, and it were better to return to the freedom 
and amplitude of the interior ? 

On the second day, much that was wonderful in a 
first experience of the festival was gone ; but though 
the novelty had passed away, the cause for wonder 
was even greater. If on the first day the crowd 
was immense, it was now something which the im- 
perfect state of the language will not permit me to 
describe ; perhaps awful will serve the purpose as 
well as any other word now in use. As you looked 
round, from the centre of the building, on that rest- 
less, fanning, fluttering multitude, to right and left 
and north and south, all comparisons and similitudes 
abandoned you. If you were to write of the scene, 
you felt that your effort, at the best, must be a meagre 
.sketch, suggesting something to those who had seen 
the fact, but conveying no intelligible impression of 
it to any one else. The galleries swarmed, the vast 
slopes were packed, in the pampa-like parquet even 
the aisles were half filled with chairs, while a cloud 
of placeless wandei-ers moved ceaselessly on the bor- 
ders of the mass under the balconies. 

When that common-looking, uncommon little man 
whom we have called to rule over us entered the 
house, and walked quietly down to his seat in the 
centre of it, a wild, inarticulate clamor, like no other 
noise in the world, swelled from every side, till' 
General Grant rose and showed himself, when it 



206 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

grew louder than ever, and then gradully subsided 
into silence. Then a voice, which might be uttering 
some mortal alarm, broke repeatedly across the still- 
ness from one of the balconies, and a thousand glasses 
were leveled in that direction, while everywhere else 
the mass hushed itself with a mute sense of peril. 
The capacity of such an assemblage for self-destruc- 
tion was, in fact, but too evident. From fire, in an 
edifice of which the sides could be knocked out in a 
moment, there could have been little danger ; the 
fabric's strength had been perfectly tested the day 
before, and its fall was not to be apprehended ; but 
we had ourselves greatly to dread. A panic could 
have been caused by any mad or wanton person, in 
which thousands might have been instantly trampled 
to death ; and it seemed long till that foolish voice 
was stilled, and the house lapsed back into tranquillity, 
and the enjoyment of the music. In the performance 
I recall nothing disagreeable, nothing that to my igno- 
rance seemed imperfect, though I leave it to the wise 
in music to say how far the great concert was a suc- 
cess. I saw a flourish of the director's wand, and I 
heard the voices or the instruments, or both, respond, 
and I knew by my programme that I was enjoying an 
unprecedented quantity of Haydn or Handel or Mey- 
erbeer or Rossini or Mozart, afforded with an unques- 
tionable precision and promptness ; but I own that I 
liked better to stroll about the three-acre house, and 
that for me the music was, at best, only one of the 
joys of the festival. 

There was good heai'ing outside for those that 



JUBILEE DAYS. 207 

riesired to listen to the music, Avith seats to let in 
the surrounding tents and booths ; and there was 
unlimited seeing for the mere looker-on. At least 
fifty thousand people seemed to have come to the 
Jubilee with no other purpose than to gaze upon the 
outside of the building. The crowd was incompara- 
bly greater than that of the day before ; all the main 
thoroughfares of the city roared with a tide of feet 
that swept through the side streets, and swelled aim- 
lessly up the places, and eddied there, and poured 
out again over the pavements. The carriage-ways 
were packed with every sort of vehicle, with foot- 
passengers crowded from the sidewalks, and with the 
fragments of the military parade in honor of the 
President, with infantry, with straggling cavalry- 
men, with, artillery. All the paths of the Common 
and the Garden were filled, and near the Coliseum 
the throngs densified on every side into an almost 
impenetrable mass, that made the doors of the build- 
ing difficult to approach and at times inaccessible. 

The crowd differed from that of the first day 
chiefly in size. There were more country faces and 
country garbs to be seen, though it was still, on the 
whole, a regular-featured and well-dressed crowd, 
with still very few but American visages. It seemed 
to be also a very frugal-minded crowd, and to spend 
little upon the refreshments and amusements pro- 
vided for it. In these, oddly enough, there was 
notliing of the march of mind to be observed ; they 
were the refreshments and amusements of a former 
generation. I think it would not be extravagant to 



208 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

say that there were tons of pie for sale in a multitude 
of booths, with lemonade, soda-water, and ice-cream 
in proportion ; but I doubt if there was a ton of pie 
sold, and towards the last the venerable pastry was 
quite covered with dust. Neither did people seem 
to care much for oranges or bananas or peanuts, or 
even pop-corn, — five cents a package and a prize in 
each package. Many booths stood unlet, and in 
others the pulverous ladies and gentlemen, their 
proprietors, were in the enjoyment of a leisure which 
would have been eleo-ant if it had not been forced. 
There was one shanty, not other\Yise distinguished 
from the rest, in which French soups were declared 
to be for sale ; but these alien pottages seemed to be 
no more favored than the most poisonous of our 
national viands. But perhaps they were not French 
soups, or perhaps the vicinage of the shanty was not 
such as to impress a belief in their genuineness upon 
people who like French soups. Let us not be too 
easily disheartened by the popular neglect of them. 
If the daring reformer who inscribed French soups 
upon his sign will reappear ten years hence, we shall 
all flock to his standard. Slavery is abolished ; pie 
must follow. Doubtless in the year 1900, the man- 
agers of a Jubilee would even let the refreshment- 
rooms within their Coliseum to a cook who would 
offer the public something not so much worse than 
the worst that could be found in the vilest shanty 
restaurant on the ground. At the Jubilee, of which 
I am writing, the unhappy person who went into the 
Coliseum rooms to refresh himself was offered for 



JUBILEE DAYS. 209 

coffee a salty and unctuous wash, in one of those 
thick cups which are supposed to be proof against 
the hard usage of " guests " and sculhons in humble 
eating-houses, and which are always so indescribably 
nicked and cracked, and had pushed towards him a 
bowl of veteran sugar, and a tin spoon that had 
never been cleaned in the world, while a young per- 
son stood by, and watched him, asking, " Have you. 
paid for that coffee ? " 

The side-shows and the other amusements seemed 
to have addressed themselves to the crowd with the 
same mistaken notion of its character and require- 
ments ; though I confess that I witnessed their neg- 
lect with regret, whether from a feeling that they 
were at least harmless, or an unconscious sympathy 
with any quite idle and unprofitable thmg. Those 
rotary, legless horses, on which children love to ride 
in a perpetual sickening circle, — the type of all our 
effort, — were nearly always mounted ; but those 
other whirligigs, or whatever the dreadful circles^ 
with their swinging seats are called, were often so 
empty that they must have been distressing, from 
their want of balance, to the muscles as well as the 
spirits of their proprietors. The society of monsters 
was also generally shunned, and a cow with five legs 
gave milk from the top of her back to an audience 
of not more than six persons. The public apathy 
had visibly wrought upon the temper of the gen- 
tleman who lectured upon this gifted animal, and 
he took inquiries in an ironical manner that con- 
trasted disadvantageously with the philosophical' 
U 



210 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

serenity of the person who had a weighing-machine 
outside, and whom I saw sitting in the chair and 
weighing himself by the hour, with an expression of 
profound enjoyment. Perhaps a man of less bulk 
could not have entered so keenly into that simple 
pleasure. 

There was a large tent on the grounds for dramat- 
ical entertainments, with six performances a day, 
into which I was lured by a profusion of high-colored 
posters, and some such announcement, as that the 
beautiful serio-comic danseuse and world-renowned 
cloggist, Mile. Brown, would appear. About a 
dozen people were assembled within, and we waited 
a half-hour beyond the time announced for the cur- 
tain to rise, during which the spectacle of a young man 
in black broadcloth, eating a cocoa-nut with his pen- 
knife, had a strange and painful fascination. At the 
end of this half-hour, our number was increased to 
eighteen, when the orchestra appeared, — a snare- 
drummer and two buglers. These took their place 
at the back of the tent ; the buglers, who were 
Germans, blew seriously and industriously at their 
horns ; but the native-born citizen, who played the 
drum, beat it very much at random, and in the mean 
time smoked a cigar, while his humorous friend kept 
time upon his shoulders by striking him there with a 
cane. How long this might have lasted, I cannot 
tell ; but, after another delay, I suddenly bethought 
me whether it were not better not to see Mile. 
Brown, after all ? I rose, and stole softly out be- 
hind the rhythmic back of the drummer ; and the 



JUBILEE DAYS. 211 

world-renowned cloggist is to me at this moment 
only a beautiful dream, — an airy shape fashioned 
upon a hint supplied by the engraver of the posters. 

What, then, did the public desire, if it would not 
smile upon the swings, or monsters, or dramatic 
amusements that had pleased so long? Was the 
music, as it floated out from the Coliseum, a suffi- 
cient delight ? Or did the crowd, averse to the 
shows provided for it, crave something higher and 
more intellectual, — like, for example, a course of 
the Lowell Lectures ? Its general expression had 
changed : it had no longer that entire gayety of the 
first day, but had taken on something of the sarcastic 
pathos with which we Americans bear most oppressive 
and fatiguing things as a good joke. The dust was 
blown about in clouds ; and here and there, sitting 
upon the vacant steps that led up and down among 
the booths, were dejected and motionless men and 
women, passively gathering dust, and apparently 
awaiting burial under the accumulating sand, — the 
mute, melancholy sphinxes of the Jubilee, with their 
unsolved riddle, " Why did we come ? " At inter- 
vals, the heavens shook out fierce, sudden showers 
of rain, that scattered the surging masses, and sent 
them flying impotently hither and thither for shelter 
where no shelter was, only to gather again, and 
move aimlessly and comfortlessly to and fro, like a 
lost child. 

So the multitude roared within and without the 
Coliseum as I turned homeward ; and yet I found it 
wandering with weary feet through the Garden, and 



212 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

the Common, and all the streets, and it dragged its 
innumerable aching legs with me to the railroad 
station, and, entering the train, stood up on tliem, — 
having paid for the tickets with which the companies 
professed to sell seats. 

How still and cool and fresh it Avas at our subur- 
ban station, when the train, speeding away with a 
sardonic yell over the misery of the passengers yet 
standing up in it, left us to walk across the quiet 
fields and pleasant lanes to Benicia Street, through 
groups of little idyllic Irish boys playing base-ball, 
with milch-goats here and there pastorally cropping 
the herbage ! 

In this pleasant seclusion I let all Bunker Hill 
Day thunder by, with its cannons, and processions, 
and speeches, and patriotic musical uproar, hearing 
only through my open window the note of the birds 
sino-ing in a leafy coliseum across the street, and 
making very fair music without an anvil among 
them. " Ah, signor ! " said one of my doorstep 
acquaintance, who came next morning and played 
me Captain Jenks, — the new air he has had added 
to his instrument, — " never in my life, neither at 
Torino, nor at Milano, nor even at Genoa, never did 
■ I see such a crowd or hear such a noise, as at that 
Colosseo yesterday. The carriages, the horses, the 
feet ! And the dust, O Dio mio ! All those millions 
of people were as white as so many millers ! " 

On the afternoon of the fourth day the city looked 
quite like the mill in which these millers had been 
grinding ; and even those unpromisingly elegant 



JUBILEE DAYS. 213 

streets of the Back Bay showed mansions powdered 
with dust enough for sentiment to strike root in, and 
so soften them with its tender green against the time 
when they shall be ruinous and sentiment shall swal- 
low them up. The crowd had perceptibly dimin- 
ished, but it was still great, and on the Common it 
was allured by a greater variety of recreations and 
bargains than I had yet seen there. There were, 
of course, all sorts of useful and instructive amuse- 
ments, — at least a half-dozen telescopes, and as 
many galvanic batteries, with numerous patented 
inventions ; and I fancied that most of the peddlers 
and charlatans addressed themselves to a utilitarian 
spirit supposed to exist in us. A man that sold 
whistles capable of reproducing exactly the notes of 
the mocking-bird and the guinea-pig set forth the 
durability of the invention. " Now, you see this 
whistle, gentlemen. It is rubber, all rubber ; and 
rubber, you know, enters into the composition of a 
great many valuable articles. This whistle, then, is 
entirely of rubber, — no worthless or flimsy material 
that drops to pieces the moment you put it to your 
lips," — as if it were not utterly desirable that it 
should. " Now, I'll give you the mocking-bird, 
gentlemen, and then I'll give you the guinea-pig, 
upon this pure Indla-ruhher whistle." And he did 
so with a great animation, — this young man with a 
perfectly intelligent and very handsome face. " Tiy 
your strength, and renovate your system ! " cried 
the proprietor of a piston padded at one end and 
working into a cylinder when you struck it a blow 



214 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

with your fist; and the owners of lung-testing 
machines called upon you from every side to try 
their consumption cure ; while the galvanic-battery 
men sat still and mutely appealed with inscriptions 
attached to their cap-visors declaring that electricity 
taken from their batteries would rid you of every ache 
and pain known to suffering humanity. Yet they 
were themselves as a class in a state of sad physical 
disrepair, and one of them was the visible prey of 
rheumatism which he might have sent flying from his 
joints with a single shock. The only person whom 
I saAv improving his health with the battery was a 
rosy-faced school-boy, who was taking ten cents' 
worth of electricity ; and I hope it did not disagree 
with his pop-corn and soda-water. 

Farther on was a pictux'esque group of street- 
musicians, — violinists and harpers ; a brother and 
four sisters, by their looks, — who afforded almost 
the only unpractical amusement to be enjoyed on 
the Common, though not far from them was a blind 
old negro, playing upon an accordion, and singing to 
it in the faintest and thinnest of black voices, who 
could hardly have profited any listener. No one 
appeared to mind him, till a jolly Jack-tar with both 
arms cut off, but dressed ir. full sailor's togs, lurched 
heavily towards him. This mariner had got quite a 
good effect of sea-legs by some means, and looked 
rather drunker than a man with both arms ought to 
be ; but he was very affectionate, and, putting his 
face close to the other's, at once entered into talk 
with the blind man, forming with him a picture curi- 



JUBILEE DAYS. 215 

ously pathetic and grotesque. He was the only 
tipsy person I saw during the Jubilee days, — if he 
was tipsy, for after all they may have been real sea^ 
legs he had on. 

If the throng upon the streets was thinner, it was 
greater in the Coliseum than on the second day ; and 
matters had settled there into regular working order. 
The limits of individual liberty had been better 
ascertained ; there was no longer any movement in 
the aisles, but a constant passing to and fro, between 
the pieces, in the promenades. The house presented, 
as before, that appearance in which reality forsook 
it, and it became merely an amazing picture. The 
audience supported the notion of its unreality by 
having exactly the character of the former audiences, 
and impressed you, despite its restlessness and inces- 
sant agitation, with the feeling that it had remained 
there from the first day, and would always continue 
there ; and it was only in wandering upon its bor- 
ders through the promenades, that you regained 
possession of facts concerning it. In no other way 
was its vastness more observable than in the perfect 
indifference of persons one to another. Eacli found 
himself, as it were, in a solitude ; and, sequestered 
in that wilderness of strangers, each was freed of his 
bashfulness and trepidation. Young people lounged 
at ease upon the floors, about the windows, on the 
upper promenades ; and in this seclusion I saw such 
betrayals of tenderness as melt the heart of the 
traveller on our desolate railway trains, — Fellows 
moving to and fro or standing, careless of other eyes, 



216 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

with their arms around the waists of their Girls. 
These were, of course, people who had only attained 
a certain grade of civilization, and were not charac- 
teristic of the crowd, or, indeed, worthy of notice 
except as expressions of its unconsciousness. I 
fancied that I saw a number of their class outside 
listening to the address of the agent of a patent lini- 
ment, proclaimed to be an unfailing specific for neu- 
ralgia and headache, — if used in the right spirit. 
" For," said the orator, " we like to cure people who 
treat us and our medicine with respect. Folks say, 
' What is there about that man ? — some magnetism 
or electricity.' And the other day at New Britain, 
Connecticut, a young man he come up to the car- 
riage, sneering like, and he tried the cure, and it 
didn't have the least effect upon him," There 
seemed reason in this, and it produced a visible sen- 
sation in the Fellows and Girls, who grinned sheep- 
ishly at each other. 

Why will the young man with long hair force 
himself at this point into a history, which is striving 
to devote itself to graver interests ? There he stood 
with the other people, gazing up at the gay line of 
streamers on the summit of the Coliseum, and taking 
in the Anvil Chorus Avith the rest, — a young man 
well-enough dressed, and of a pretty sensible face, 
with his long black locks falling from under his cyl- 
inder hat, and covering his shoulders. What awful 
spell was on him, obliging him to make that figure 
before his fellow-creatures ? He had nothing to 
sell ; he was not, apparently, an advertisement of 



JUBILEE DAYS. 217 

any kind. Was he in the performance of a vow ? 
Was he in his right mind ? For shame ! a person 
may wear his hair long if he will. But why not, 
then, in a top-knot ? This young man's long hair 
was not in keeping with his frock-coat and his cylin- 
der hat, and he had not at all the excuse of the old 
gentleman who sold salve in the costume of Wash- 
ington's time ; one could not take pleasure in him as' 
in the negro advertiser, who paraded the grounds in 
a costume compounded of a consular chapeau bras 
and a fox-hunter's top-boots — the American diplo- 
matic uniform of the future — and offered every one 
a printed billet ; he hj^d not even the attraction of 
the cabalistic herald of Hunkidori. Who was he ? 
what was he ? why was he ? The mind played for- 
ever around these questions in a maze of hopeless 
conjecture. 

Had all those quacks and peddlers been bawling 
ever since Tuesday to the same listeners ? Had all 
those swings and whirligigs incessantly performed 
their rounds? The cow that gave milk from the 
top of her back, had she never changed her small 
circle of admirers, or ceased her flow? And the 
gentleman who sat in the chair of his own balance, 
how much did he weigh by this time ? One could 
scarcely rid one's self of the illusion of perpetuity 
concerning these things, and I could not believe 
that, if I went back to the Coliseum grounds at any 
future time, I should not behold all that vast machin- 
ery in motion. 

It was curious to see, amid this holiday turmoil, 



218 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

men pursuing the ordinary business of their lives, 
and one was strangely rescued and consoled by the 
spectacle of the Irish hod-carriers, and the brick- 
layers at work on a first-class swell-front residence 
in the very heart of the city of tents and booths. 
Even the locomotive, being associated with quieter 
days and scenes, appealed, as it whistled to and fro 
upon the Providence Railroad, to some soft bucolic 
sentiment in the listener, and sending its note, 
ordinarily so discordant, across that human uproar, 
seemed to "babble of green fields." And at last 
it wooed us away, and the Jubilee was again swal- 
lowed up by night. 

There was yet another Jubilee Day, on the morn- 
ing of Avhich the thousands of public-school children 
clustered in gauzy pink and wliite in the place of the 
mighty chorus, while the Coliseum swarmed once 
more with people who listened to those shrill, sweet 
pipes blending in unison ; but I leave the reader to 
imagine what he will about it. A week later, after 
all was over, I was minded to walk down towards the 
Coliseum, and behold it in its desertion. The city 
streets were restored to their wonted summer-after- 
noon tranquillity ; the Public Garden presented its 
customary phases of two people sitting under a tree 
and talking intimatelv together on some theme of 
common interest, — 

" Bees, bees, was it your hydromel? " — 

of the swans sailing in full view upon the little lake : 
of half a dozen idlers hanging upon the bridge to 
look at them ; of children gayly dotting the paths 



JUBILEE DAYS. 219 

here and there ; and, to heighten the peacefuhiess 
of the effect, a pretty, pale invaUd lady sat, half in 
shade and half in sun, reading in an easy-chair. Far 
down the broad avenue a single horse-car tinkled 
slowly ; on the steps of one of the mansions charm- 
ing little girls stood in a picturesque group full of 
the bright color which abounds in the lovely dresses 
of this time. As I drew near the Coliseum, I could 
perceive the desolation wliich had fallen upon the 
festival scene ; the white tents were gone ; the place 
where the Avorld-renowned cloggist gave her serio- 
comic dances was as lonely and silent as the site of 
Carthage ; in the middle distance tAvo men were dis- 
mantlino; a motionless whirligio- : the hut for the sale 
of French soups was closed ; farther away, a solitary 
policeman moved gloomily across the deserted spaces, 
showing his dark-blue figure against the sky. The 
vast fabric of the Coliseum reared itself, hushed and 
deserted within and without ; and a boy in his shirt- 
sleeves pressed his nose against one of the painted 
window-panes in the vain effort to behold the noth- 
ing inside. But sadder than this loneliness sur- 
rounding the Coliseum, sadder than the festooned 
and knotted banners that di-ooped funereally upon 
its facade, was the fact that some of those luckless 
refreshment-saloons were still open, displaying viands 
as little edible now as carnival confetti. It was as 
if the proprietors, in an unavailing remorse, had con- 
demned themselves to spend the rest of their days 
there, and, slowly consuming their own cake ahd 
pop-corn, washed down with their own soda-watej 
and lemonade, to perish of dyspepsia and despair. 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF 
MORALS. 

Any study of suburban life would be very imper- 
fect without some glance at that larger part of it 
which is spent in the painful pursuit of pleasures 
such as are offered at the ordinary places of public 
amusement ; and for this reason I excuse myself for 
rehearsing certain impressions here which are not 
more directly suburban, to say the least, than those 
recounted in the foregoing chapter. 

It became, shortly after life in Charlesbridge 
began, a question whether any entertainment that 
Boston could offer were worth the trouble of going 
to it, or, still worse, coming from it ; for if it was 
misery to hurry from tea to catch the inward horse- 
car at the head of the street, what sullen lexicon 
will afford a name for the experience of getting 
home again by the last car out from the city ? You 
have watched the clock much more closely than the 
stage during the last act, and have left your play 
incomplete by its final marriage or death, and have 
rushed up to Bowdoin Square, where you achieve a 
standing place in the car, and, utterly spent as you 
are with the enjoyment of the evening, you endure 
for the next hour all that is horrible in riding or 
walking. At the end of this time you declare that 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 221 

you will never go to the theatre again ; and after 
years of suffering you come at last to keep your 
word. 

While yet, however, in the state of formation as 
regards this resolution, I went frequently to the 
theatre — or school of morals, as its friends have 
humorously called it. I will not say whether any 
desired amelioration took place or not in my own 
morals through the agency of the stage ; but if not 
enlightened and refined by everything I saw there, 
I sometimes was certainly very much surprised. 
Now that I go no more, or very, very rarely, I avail 
myself of the resulting leisure to set down, for the 
instruction of posterity, some account of perform- 
ances I witnessed in the years 1868-69, which I am 
persuaded will grow all the more curious, if not in- 
credible, with the lapse of time. 

There is this satisfaction in Kving, namely, that 
whatever we do will one day wear an air of pic- 
turesqueness and romance, and will win the fancy 
of people coming after us. This stupid and com- 
monplace present shall yet appear the fascinating 
past ; and is it not a pleasure to think how our 
rogues of descendants — who are to enjoy us aesthet- 
ically — will be taken in with us, when they read, 
in the files of old newspapers, of the quantity of 
entertainment offered us at the theatres during the 
years mentioned, and judge us by it ? I imagine 
them two hundred years hence looking back at us, 
and sighing, " Ah ! there was a touch of the old 
Greek hfe in those Athenians ! How they loved the 



222 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

drama in the jolly Boston of that day ! That was 
the golden age of the theatre : in the winter of 
1868-69, they had dramatic performances in seven 
places, of every degree of excellence, and the man- 
agers coined money." As we always figure our an- 
cestors going to and from church, they will probably 
figure us thronging the doors of theatres, and no 
doubt there will be some historical gossiper among 
them to sketch a Boston audience in 1869, with all 
oxu" famous poets and politicians grouped together in 
the orchestra seats, and several now dead introduced 
with the pleasant inaccuracy and uncertainty of his- 
torical gossipers. " On this night, when the beau- 
tiful Tost(ie reappeared, the whole house rose to 
greet her. If Mr. Alcott was on one of his winter 
visits to Boston, no doubt he stepped in from the 
Marlborough House, — it was a famous temperance 
hotel, then in the height of its repute, — not only to 
welcome back the great actress, but to enjoy a chat 
between the acts with his many friends. Here,. 
doubtless, was seen the broad forehead of Webster ; 
there the courtly Everett, conversing in studied 
tones with the gifted So-and-so. Did not the 
lovely Such-a-one grace the evening Avith her pres- 
ence ? The brilliant and versatile Edmund Kirke 
was dead ; but the humorous Artemas Ward and 
his friend Nasby may have attracted many eyes, 
having come hither at the close of their lectures, to 
testify their love of the beautiful in nature and 
art ; while, perhaps, Mr. Sumner, in the intervals 
of state cares, relaxed into the enjoyment," etc. 
" Vous voyez bien le tableau ! " 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 223 

That far-off posterity, learning that all our thea- 
tres are filled every night, will never understand 
but we were a theatre-going people in the sense 
that it is the highest fashion to be seen at the play ; 
and yet we are sensible that it is not so, and that 
the Boston which makes itself known in civiliza- 
tion — in letters, politics, reform — goes as little to 
the theatre as fashionable Boston. 

The stage is not an Institution with us, I should 
say ; yet it affords recreation to a very large and in- 
creasing number of persons, and while it would be 
easy to over-estimate its influence for good or evil 
even with these, there is no doubt that the stage, if 
not the drama, is popular. Fortunately an inquiry 
like this into a now waning taste in theatricals con- 
cerns the fact rather than the effect of the taste ; 
otherwise the task might become indefinitely hard 
alike for writer and for reader. No one can lay his 
hand on his heart, and declare that he is the worse 
for having seen " La Belle Helene," for example, or 
say more than that it is a thing which ought not to 
be seen by any one else ; yet I suppose there is no 
one ready to deny that " La Belle Helene " was the 
motive of those performances that have most pleased 
the most people during recent years. There was 
something fascinating in the circumstances and au- 
spices vmder which the united Irma and Tostde 
troupes appeared in Boston — o-pera houffe led gayly 
forward by finance houffe, and suggesting Erie 
shares by its watered music and morals ; but there 
is no doubt that Tost^e's grand reception was owing 



224 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

mainly to the personal favor which she enjoyed here, 
and which we do not vouchsafe to every one. Ris- 
tori did not win it ; we did our duty by her, folloAv- 
ing her carefully with the libretto, and in her most 
intense effects turning the leaves of a thousand 
pamphlets with a rustle that must have shattered 
every delicate nerve in her ; but we were always 
cold to her greatness. It was not for Tost^e's sing- 
ing, which was but a little thing in itself ; it was 
not for her beauty, for that was no more than a 
reminiscence, if it was not always an illusion ; was 
it because she rendered the spirit of M. Offenbach's 
operas so perfectly, that we liked her so much ? 
" Ah, that movement ! " cried an enthusiast, " that 
swing, that — that — wriggle ! " She was undoubt- 
edly a great actress, full of subtle surprises, and 
with an audacious appearance of unconsciousness 
in those exigencies where consciousness would sum- 
mon the police — or should ; she was so near, yet so 
far from, the worst that could be intended ; in tones, 
in gestures, in attitudes, she was to the libretto just 
as the music was, now making it appear insolently 
and unjustly coarse, now feebly inadequate in its 
explicit immodesty. 

To see this famous lady in " La Grande Duchesse " 
or " La Belle Helene " was an experience never to 
be forgotten, and certainly not to be described. The 
former opera has undoubtedly its proper and blame- 
less charm. There is something pretty and arch in 
the notion of the Duchess's falling in love with the 
impregnably faitlif ul and innocent Fritz ; and the 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 225 

extravagance of the whole, with the satire upon the 
typical little German court, is deliglitful. But 
"La Belle Hdlene " is^a wittier play than "La 
Grande Duchesse," and it is the vividest expression 
of the spirit of opera bouffe. It is full of such 
lively mockeries as that of Helen when she gazes 
upon the picture of Leda and the Swan : " J'aime 
a me recueiller devant ce tableau de famille ! Mon 
pere, ma mere, les. voici tons les deux ! O mon 
pere, tourne vers ton enfant un bee favorable ! " — 
or of Paris when he represses the zeal of Calchas, 
who desires to present him at once to Helen : 
" Soit ! mais sans lui dire qui je suis ; — je ddsire 
garder le plus strict incognito, jusq'aii moment oil 
la situation sera favorable a un coup de theatre." 
But it must be owned that our audiences seemed 
not to take much pleasure in these and other witti- 
cisms, though they obliged Mademoiselle Tostee to 
sing " Un Mari sage " three times, with all those 
actions and postures which seem incredible the mo- 
ment they have ceased. They possibly understood 
this song no better than the strokes of wit, and en- 
cored it merely for the music's sake. The effect 
was, nevertheless, unfortunate, and calculated to 
give those French ladies but a bad opinion of our 
morals. How could they comprehend that the 
taste was, like themselves, imported, and that its 
indulgence here did not characterize us? It was 
only in appearance that, while we did not enjoy 
the wit we delighted in the coarseness. And how 
coarse this travesty of the old fable mainly is ! 

15 



22G SUBUEBAN SKETCHES. 

That priest Calchas, Avith his unspeakable snicker, 
his avarice, his infidelity, his hypocrisy, is alone 
infamy enougli to provoke «the destruction of a city. 
Then that scene interrupted by Menelaus ! It is 
indisputably witty, and since all those people are so 
purely creatures of fable, and dwell so entirely in 
an unmoral atmosphere, it appears as absurd to 
blame it as the murders in a pantomime. To be 
sure there is something about murder, some inherent 
grace or refinement perhaps, that makes its actual 
representation upon the stage more tolerable than 
the most diffident suggestion of adultery. Not that 
" La Belle Helene " is open to the reproach of over- 
delicacy in this scene, or any other, for the matter of 
that, though there is a strain of real poetry in the 
conception of this whole episode of Helen's intention 
to pass all Paris's love-making off upon herself for a 
dream, — poetry such as might have been inspired 
by a muse that had taken too much nectar. There 
is excellent character, also, as well as caricature in 
the drama ; not only Calchas is admirably done, but 
Agamemnon, and Achilles, and Helen, and Mene- 
laus, " pas un mari ordinaire . . . . un mari epique," 
— and the burlesque is good of its kind. It is ar- 
tistic, as it seems French dramatic effort must almost 
necessarily be. It could scarcely be called the fault 
of the opera houffe that the English burlesque should 
have come of its success ; nor could the public blame 
it for the great favor the burlesque won in those 
far-off winters, if indeed the public wishes to bestow 
blame for this. No one, however, could see one of 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 227 

these curious travesties without being reminded, in 
an awkward way, of the morale of the opera bouffe, 
and of the personnel — as I may say — of "The 
Black Crook," " The White Fawn," and the " Dev- 
il's Auction." There was the same intention of 
merriment at the cost of what may be called the 
marital prejudices, though it cannot be claimed that 
the wit was the same as in " La Belle Helene ; " 
there was the same physical unreserve as in the 
ballets of a former season ; while in its dramatic 
form the burlesque discovered very marked parental 
traits. 

This English burlesque, this child of M. Offen- 
bach's genius, and the now somewhat faded spectac- 
ular muse, flourished at the time of which I -write 
in three of our seven theatres for months, — five, 
from the highest to the lowest being in turn open 
to it, — and had begun, in a tentative way, to in- 
vade the deserted stage even so long ago as the 
previous sviranier ; and I have sometimes flattered 
myself that it was my fortune to witness the first 
exhibition of its most characteristic feature in a the- 
atre into which I wandered one sultry night because 
it was the nearest theatre. They were giving a 
play called " The Three Fast Men," which had a 
moral of such powerful virtue that it ought to have 
reformed everybody in the neighborhood. Three 
ladies being in love with the three fast men, and re- 
solved to win them back to regular hour's and the 
paths of sobriety by every device of the female 
heart, dress themselves in men's clothes, — such is 



228 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

the subtlety of the female heart in the bosoms of 
modern young ladies of fashion, — and follow their 
lovers about from one haunt of dissipation to an- 
other and become themselves exemplarily vicious, — 
drunkards, gamblers, and the like. The first lady, 
who was a star in her lowly orbit, was very great 
in all her different roles, appearing now as a sailor 
with the hornpipe of his calling, now as an organ- 
grinder, and now as a dissolute young gentleman, — 
whatever was tlie exigency of good morals. The 
dramatist seemed to have had an eye to her pecul- 
iar capabilities, and to have expressly invented 
edifying characters and situations that her talents 
might enforce them. The second young lady had 
also a personal didactic gift, rivaling, and even sur- 
passing in some respects, that of the star ; and was 
very rowdy indeed. In due time the devoted con- 
duct of the young ladies has its just effect : the 
three fast men begin to reflect upon the folly of 
their wild courses ; and at this point the dramatist 
delivers his great stroke. The first lady gives a 
soirSe dansante et chantante, and the three fast 
men have invitations. The guests seat themselves, 
as at a fashionable party, in a semicircle, and the 
gayety of the evening begins with conundrums and 
playing upon the banjo ; the gentlemen are in their 
morning-coats, and the ladies in a display of ho- 
siery which is now no longer surprising, and which 
need not have been mentioned at all except for the 
fact that, in the case of the first lady, it seemed not 
to have been freshly put on for that party. In this 



SOME LESSONS FROJI THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 229 

instance an element comical beyond intention was 
present, in three young gentlemen, an amateur mu- 
sical trio, who had kindly consented to sing their 
favorite song of " The Rolling Zuyder Zee," as 
they now kindly did, with flushed faces, unmanage- 
able hands, and much repetition of 

The ro-o-o-o — 
• The ro-o-o-o — 

The ro-o-o-o-U — 
Ing Zuyder Zee, 
Zuyder Zee, 
Zuyder Zee-e-e ! 

Then the turn of the three guardian angels of the 
fast men being come again they get up and dance 
each one a breakdown which seems to establish 
their lovers (now at last in the secret of the gen- 
erous ruse played upon them) firmly in their reso- 
lution to lead a better life. They are in nowise 
shaken from it by the displeasure which soon shows 
itself in the manner of the first and second ladies. 
The former is greatest in the so-called Protean 
parts of the play, and is obscured somewhat by the 
dancing of the latter ; but she has a daughter who' 
now comes on and sings a song. The pensive occa- 
sion, the favorable mood of the audience, the sym- 
pathetic attitude of the players, invite her to sing 
" The Maiden's Prayer," and so we have " The 
Maiden's Prayer." We may be a low set, and the 
song may be affected and insipid enough, but the 
purity of its intention touches, and the little girl is 
vehemently applauded. She is such a pretty child, 
with her innocent face, and her artless white dress, 



230 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

and blue ribbons to her waist and haii\ that we will 
have her back again ; whereupon she runs out upon 
the stage, strikes up a rowd}^, rowdy air, dances a 
shocking little dance, and vanishes from the dis- 
mayed vision, leaving us a considerably lower set 
than we were at first, and glad of our lowness. 
This is the second lady's own ground, however, and 
now she comes out — in a way that banishes far 
from our fickle minds all thoughts of the first lady 
and her mistaken child — ^vith a medley of singing 
and dancing, a bit of breakdown, of cancan, of jig, a 
bit of " Le Sabre de mon Pere," and of all merro- 
rable slang songs, given with the most grotesque and 
clownish spirit that ever inspired a woman. Each 
member of the company follows in his or her pas 
seul, and then they all dance together to the plain 
confusion of the amateur trio, whose eyes roll like 
so many Zuyder Zees, as they sit lonely and mo- 
tionless in the midst. All stiffness and formahty 
are overcome. The evening jjarty in fact disap- 
pears entirely, and we are suffered to see the artists 
in their moments of social relaxation sitting as it 
were around the theatrical fireside. They appear 
to forget us altogether ; they exchange mnks, and 
nods, and jests of quite personal application ; they 
call each other by name, by their Christian names, 
their nicknames. It is not an evening party, it is a 
famil}" party, and the suggestion of home enjoyment 
completes the reformation of the three fast men. 
We see them marry the three fast women before we 
leave the house. 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 231 

On another occasion, two suburban friends of the 
drama beheld a more explicit precursor of the com- 
ing burlesque at one of the minor theatres last sum- 
mer. The great actress whom they had come to 
see on another scene was ill, and in their disappoint- 
ment they embraced the hope of entertainment of- 
fered them at the smaller playhouse. The drama 
itself was neither here nor there as to intent, but 
the public appetite or the manager's conception of 
it — for I am by no means sure that this whole 
business was not a misunderstanding — had exacted 
that the actresses should appear in so much stock- 
ing, and so little else, that it was a horror to look 
upon them. There was no such exigency of dia- 
logue, situation, or character as asked the indeco- 
rum, and the effect upon the unprepared spectator 
was all the more stupefying from the fact that most 
of the ladies were not dancers, and had not counte- 
nances that consorted with improjsriety. Their 
faces had merely the conventional Yankee sharp- 
ness and wanness of feature, and such difference of 
air and character as should say for one and another, 
shop-girl, shoe-binder, seamstress ; and it seemed 
an absurdity and an injustice to refer to them in 
any way the disclosures of the ruthlessly scant dra- 
pery. A grotesque fancy would sport with their 
identity : " Did not this or that one Avrite poetry 
for her local newspaper ? " so much she looked the 
average culture and crudeness ; and when such a 
one, coldly yielding to the manager's ideas of the 
public taste, stretched herself on a green baize bank 



232 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

with her feet towards us, or did a similar grossness, 
it was hard to keep from crying aloud in protest, 
that she need not do it ; that nobody really ex- 
pected or wanted it of her. Nobody ? Alas ! there 
were people there — poor souls who had the appear- 
,ance of coming every night — who plainly did ex- 
pect it, and who were loud in their applauses of the 
chief actress. This was a young person of a power- 
ful physical expression, quite unlike the rest, — who 
were dyspeptic and consumptive in the range of 
their charms, — and she triumphed and wantoned 
through the scenes with a fierce excess of animal 
vigor. She was all stocking, as one may say, being 
habited to represent a prince ; she had a raucous 
voice, an insolent twist of the mouth, and a terrible 
trick of defying her enemies by standing erect, chin 
up, hand on hip, and right foot advanced, patting 
the floor. It was impossible, even in the orchestra 
seats, to look at her in this attitude and not shrink 
before her ; and on the stage she visibly tyrannized 
over the invalid sisterhood with her full-blown fas- 
cinations. These unhappy girls personated, "with a 
pathetic effect not to be described, such arch anti 
fantastic creations of the poet's mind as Be^vitching- 
creature and Exquisitelittlepet, and the play was a 
kind of fairy burlesque in rhyme, of the most mel- 
ancholy stupidity that ever was. Yet there was 
something very comical in the conditions of its per- 
formance, and in the possibility that public and 
manager were playing at cross-purposes. There 
we were in the pit, an assemblage of hard-working 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 233 

Yanlvees of decently moral lives and simple tradi- 
tions, country-bred many of us and of plebeian stock 
and training, vulgar enough perhaps, but probably 
not depraved, and, excepting the first lady's friends, 
certainly not educated to the critical enjoyment of 
such spectacles ; and there on the stage were those 
mistaken women, in such sad variety of boniness 
and flabbiness as I have tried to hint, addressing 
their pitiable exposure to a supposed vileness in us, 
and wrenching from all original intent the innocent 
dullness of the drama, whicli for the most part could 
have been as well played m walking-dresses, to say 
the least. 

The scene was not less amusing, as regarded the 
audiences, the ensuing winter, when the English 
burlesque troupes which London sent us, arrived ; 
but it was not quite so pathetic as regarded the per- 
formers. Of their beaut}^ and their abandon^ the 
historical gossipor, whom I descry far down the 
future, Avaiting to refer to me as " A scandalous 
wi-iter of the period," shall learn very Httle to his 
purpose of warming his sketch with a color from 
mine. But I hope I may describe these ladies as 
very pretty, very blonde, and very unscrupulously 
clever, and still disappoint the historical gossiper. 
They seemed in all cases to be English ; no Yankee 
faces, voices, or accents were to be detected among 
them. Where they were associated with people of 
another race, as happened with one troupe, the ad- 
vantage of beauty was upon the Anglo-Saxon side, 
while that of some small shreds of propriety was 



234 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

with the Latins. • These appeared at times almost 
modest, perhaps because they were the conventional 
ballerhie, and wore the old-fashioned ballet-skirt 
with itsvolumed gauze, — a coyness which theEng-r 
lishry had greatly modified, through an exigency 
of the burlesque, — perhaps because indecorum 
seems, like blasphemy and untruth, somehow more 
graceful and becoming in southern than in northern 
races. 

As for the burlesques themselves, they were noth- 
ing, the performers personally everything. M. Of- 
fenbach had opened Lerapriere's Dictionary to the 
authors with " La Belle Helene," and there was 
commonly a flimsy raveling of parodied myth, that 
held together the different dances and songs, though 
sometimes it was a novel or an opera burlesqued ; 
but there was always a song and always a dance for 
each lady, song and dance being equally slangy, and 
depending for their effect mainly upon the natural 
or simulated personal charms of the performer. 

It was also an indispensable condition of the bur- 
lesque's success, that the characters should be re- 
versed in their representation, — that the men's 
roles should be played by women, and that at least 
one female part should be done by a man. It must 
be owned that the fun all came from this character, 
the ladies being too much occupied with the more 
serious business of bewitching us with their pretty 
figures to be very amusing ; whereas this wholesome 
man and brother, with his blonde wig, his panier, 
his dainty feminine simperings and languishings, his 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 235 

falsetto tones, and his general air of extreme fashion, 
was always exceedingly droll. He was the saving 
grace of these stupid plays ; and I cannot help 
thinking that the cancan^ as danced, in " Ivanhoe," 
by Isaac of York and the masculine Rebecca, was 
a moral spectacle ; it was the cancan made forever 
absurd and harmless. But otherwise, the bur- 
lesques were as little cheerful as profitable. The 
playwrights who had adapted them to the Ameri- 
can stage — for they were all of English authorship 
— had been good enough to throw in some political 
allusions which were supposed to be effective with 
us, but which it was sad to see received with apathy. 
It was conceivable from a certain air with which 
the actors delivered these, that they Avere in the 
habit of stirring London audiences greatly with like 
strokes of satire ; but except where Rebecca offered 
a bottle of Medford rum to Cedric the Saxon, who 
appeared in the figure of ex-President Johnson, 
they had no effect upon us. We were cold, very 
cold, to suggestions of Mr. Reverdy Johnson's now 
historical speech-making and dining ; General But- 
ler's spoons moved us just a little ; at the name of 
Grant we roared and stamped, of course, though in. 
a perfectly mechanical fashion, and without thought 
of any meaning offered vis ; those lovely women 
might have coupled the hero's name Avith whatever 
insult they chose, and still his name would have 
made us cheer them. We seemed not to care for 
points that were intended to flatter us nationally. 
I am not aware that anybody signified consciousness 



236 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

when the burlesque supported our side of the Ala- 
bama controversy, or acknowledged the self-devo- 
tion with which a threat that England should be 
made to pay was delivered by these English per- 
formers. With an equal impassiveness we greeted 
allusions to Erie shares and to the late Mr. Fiske. 

The burlesque chiefly betrayed its descent from 
the spectacular ballet in its undressing ; but that 
ballet, while it demanded personal exposure, had 
something very observable in its scenic splendors, 
and all that marching and processioning in it was 
rather pretty ; while in the burlesque there seemed 
nothing of innocent intent. No matter what the 
plot, it led always to a final great scene of break- 
down, — which was doubtless most impressive in 
that particular burlesque where this scene repre- 
sented the infernal world, and the ladies gave the 
dances of the country with a happy conception of 
the deportment of lost souls. There, after some 
vague and inconsequent dialogue, the wit springing 
from a perennial source of humor (not to specify the 
violation of the seventh commandment), the dan- 
cing commenced, each performer beginning with the 
Walk-round of the negro minstrels, rendering its 
grotesqueness with a wonderful frankness of move- 
ment, and then plunging into the mysteries of her 
dance with a kind of infuriate grace and a fierce de- 
light very curious to look upon. I am aware of the 
historical gossiper still on the alert for me, and I 
dare not say how sketchily these ladies were dressed, 
or indeed, more than that they were dressed to re- 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 237 

semble circus-riders of the other sex, but as to their 
own deceived nobody, — possibly did not intend de- 
ceit. One of them was so good a player that it 
seemed needless for her to go so far as she did in the 
dance ; but she spared herself nothing, and it re- 
mamed for her merely stalwart friends to surpass 
her, if possible. This inspired each who succeeded 
her to wantoner excesses, to wilder insolences of 
hose, to fiercer bravadoes of corsage ; while those 
not dancing responded to the sentiment of the music 
by singing shrill glees in tune mth it, clapping their 
hands, and pattmg Juba, as the act is called, — a 
peculiarly graceful and modest thing in woman.' 
The frenzy grew with every moment, and, as in 
another Vision of Sin, — 

" Then they started from their places, 
Moved with violence, changed in hue, 

Caught each other with wild grimaces, 
Half-invisible to the view. 

Wheeling with precipitate paces 
To the melody, till they flew. 

Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces 

Twisted hard in fierce embraces, 

Like to Furies, like to Graces," — 

with an occasional exchange of cuffs and kicks per- 
fectly human. The spectator found now himself 
and now the scene incredible, and indeed they were 
hardly conceivable in relation to each other. A 
melancholy sense of the absurdity, of the incon- 
gruity, of the whole absorbed at last even a sense 
of the indecency. The audience was much the same 
in appearance as other audiences, witnessing like 



238 SUBURBAN SKETCHES, 

displays at tlie other theatres, and did not differ 
greatly from the usual theatrical house. Not so 
much fashion smiled upon the efforts of these young 
ladies, as upon the cancan of the Signorina Mor- 
lacchi a winter earlier ; but there was a most fair 
appearance of honest-looking, handsomely dressed 
men and women ; and you could pick out, all over 
the parquet, faces of one descent from the deacon- 
ship, which you wondered were not afraid to behold 
one another there. The truth is, we spectators, like 
the performers themselves, lacked that tradition of 
error, of transgression, which casts its romance about 
the people of a lighter race. We had not yet set off 
one corner of the Cou^mon for a Jardin Mabille ; we 
had not even the concert-cellars of the gay and ele- 
gant New Yorker ; and nothing, really, had hap- 
pened in Boston to educate us to this new taste in 
theatricals, since the fair Quakers felt moved to tes- 
tify in the streets and churches against our spiritual 
nakedness. Yet it was to be noted \\\t\\ regret that 
our innocence, our respectability, had no restraining 
influence upon the performance ; and the fatuity of 
the hope cherished by some courageous people, that 
the presence of virtuous persons would reform the 
stage, was but too painfully evident. The doubt 
whether they were not nearer right who have de- 
nounced the theatre as essentially and incorrigibly 
bad would force itself upon the mind, though there 
was a little comfort in the thought that, if virtue 
had been actually allowed to fro-\vn upon these bur- 
lesques, the burlesques might have been abashed 



SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 239 

into propriety. The caressing arm of the law was 
cast very tenderly about the performers, and in the 
only case where a spectator presmiied to hiss, — it 
was at a pas seul of the indescribable, — a police- 
man descended upon him, and mth the succor of 
two friends of the free ballet, rent him from his 
place, and triumphed forth with him. Here was an 
end of ungenial criticism ; we all applauded zeal- 
ously after that. 

The peculiar character of the drama to which they 
devoted themselves had produced, in these ladies, 
some effects doubtless more interesting than profit- 
able to observe. One of them, whose unhappiness 
it was to take the part of soubrette in the Laughable 
Commedietta preceding the burlesque, was so ill 
at ease in di'apery, so full of awkward jerks and 
twitches, that she seemed quite another being when 
she came on later as a radiant young gentleman in 
pink silk hose, and nothing of feminine modesty in 
her dress excepting the very low corsage. A strange 
and compassionable satisfaction beamed from her 
face ; it Avas evident that this sad business was the 
poor thing's /or^g. In another company was a lady 
who had conquered all the easy attitudes of young 
men of the second or third fashion, and who must 
have been at something of a loss to identify herself 
when personating a woman off the stage. But Na- 
ture asserted herself in a way that gave a curious 
and scarcely explicable shock in the case of that 
dancer whose impudent song required the action of 
fondling a child, and who rendered the passage with 



240 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

an instinctive tenderness and grace, all the more 
pathetic for the profaning boldness of her super- 
masculine dress or undress. Commonly, however, 
the members of these burlesque troupes, though 
they were not like men, were in most things as un- 
like women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien 
sex, parodying both. It was certainly a shocking 
thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness, 
their archness in which was no charm, their grace 
which put to shame. Yet whoever beheld these 
burlesque sisters, must have fallen into perplexing 
question in his own mind as to whose was the wrong 
involved. It was not the fault of the public — all 
of us felt that : was it the fault of the hard-working 
sisterhood, bred to this as to any other business, and 
not necessarily conscious of the indecorum which 
pains my reader, — obliged to please somehow, and 
aiming, doubtless, at nothing but applause ? " La 
Belle Hel^ne " suggests the only reasonable ex- 
planation : " C'est la fatalitsy 



FLITTING. 

I WOULD not willingly repose upon the friendship 
of a man whose local attachments are weak. I 
should not demand of my intimate that he have a 
yearning for the homes of his ancestors, or even the 
scenes of his own boyhood ; that is not in American 
nature ; on the contrary, he is but a poor creature who 
does not hate the village where he was born ; yet a 
sentiment for the place where one has lived two or 
three years, the hotel where one has spent a week, 
the sleeping car in which one has ridden from Al- 
bany to Buffalo, — so much I should think it well to 
exact from my friend in proof of that sensibility and 
constancy without which true friendship does not 
exist. So much I am ready to yield on my own 
part to a friend's demand, and I profess to have all 
the possible regrets for Benicia Street, now I have 
left it. Over its deficiencies I cast a veil of decent 
oblivion, and shall always try to look upon its worthy 
and consoling aspects, which were far the more nu- 
merous. It was never otherwise, I imagine, than an 
ideal region in very great measure ; and if the read- 
er whom I have sometimes seemed to direct thither, 
should seek it out, he would hardly find my Benicia 
Street by the city sign-board. Yet this is not wholl^' 
because it was an ideal locality, but because much of 
16 



242 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

its reality has now become merely historical, a portion 
of the tragical poetry of the past. Many of the 
vacant lots abutting upon Benicia and the intersect- 
ing streets flourished up, during the four years we 
knew it, into fresh-painted wooden houses, and the 
time came to be when one might have looked in 
vain for the abandoned hoop-skirts which used to 
decorate the desirable building-sites. The lessening 
pasturage also reduced the herds which formerly fed 
in the vicinity, and at last we caught the tinkle 
of the cow-bells only as the cattle were driven past 
to remoter meadows. And one autumn afternoon 
two laborers, hired by the city, came and threw up 
an Earthwork on the opposite side of the street, 
which they said was a sidewalk, and would add to 
the value of property in the neighborhood. Not 
being di-essed with coal-ashes, however, during the 
winter, the sidewalk vanished next summer under 
a growth of rag-weed, and hid the increased values 
with it, and it is now an even question whether this 
monument of municipal grandeur will finally be held 
by Art or resumed by Nature, — who indeed has a 
perpetual motherly longing for her own, and may be 
seen in all outlying and suburban places, pathetically 
striving to steal back any neglected bits of ground 
and conceal them under her skirts of tattered and 
shabby verdure. But whatever is the event of this 
contest, and whatever the other changes wrought in 
the locality, it has not yet been quite stripped of 
the characteristic charms which first took our hearts, 
and which have been duly celebrated in these pages. 



FLITTING. 243 

When the new house was chosen, we made prep- 
arations to leave the old one, but preparations so grad- 
ual, that, if we had cared much more than we did, 
we might have suffered greatly by the prolongation 
of the agony. We proposed to ourselves to escape 
the miseries of moving by transferring the contents 
of one room at a time, and if we did not laugh incred- 
ulously at people who said we had better have it 
over at once and be done with it, it was because we 
respected their feelings, and not because we believed 
them. We took up one carpet after another ; one 
wall after another we stripped of its pictures ; we 
sent away all the books to begin with ; and by this 
subtle and ingenious process, we reduced ourselves 
to the discomfort of livino- in no house at all, as it 
were, and of being at home in neither one place nor 
the other. Yet the loo;ic of our scheme remained 
perfect ; and I do not regret its failure in practice, for 
if we had been ever so loath to quit the old house, its 
inhospitable barrenness would finally have hurried us 
forth. In fact, does not life itself in some such fashion 
dismantle its tenement until it is at last forced out 
of the uninhabitable place ? Are not the poor little 
comforts and pleasures and ornaments removed one 
by one, till life, if it would be saved, must go too ? 
We took a lesson from the teachings of mortality, " 
which are so rarely heeded, and we lingered over our 
moving. We made the process so gradual, indeed, 
that I do not feel myself all gone yet from the famil- 
iar work-room, and . for aught I can say, I still write 
there ; and as to the guest-chamber, it is so densely 



244 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

peopled by those it has lodged that it will never quite 
be emptied of them. Friends also are yet in the 
habit of calling in the parlor, and talking with us ; 
and will the chiklren never come off the stairs ? 
Does life, our high exemplar, leave so much behind 
as we did ? Is this what fills the world with ghosts? 

In the getting ready to go, nothing hurt half so 
much as the sight of the little girl packing her doll's 
things for removal. The trousseaux of all those 
elegant creatures, the wooden, the waxen, the bis- 
cuit, the india-rubber, were carefully assorted, and 
arranged in various small drawers and boxes ; their 
house was thoughtfully put in order and locked for 
transportation ; their innumerable broken sets of 
dishes were packed in paper and set out upon the 
floor, a heart-breaking little basketful. Nothing real 
in this world is so affectino; as some imacre of real- 
ity, and this travesty of our own flitting. was almost 
intolerable. I will not pretend to sentiment about 
anything else, for everything else had in it the ele- 
ment of self-support belonging to all actual afflic- 
tions. When the day of moving finally came, and 
the furniture wagon, which ought to have been only 
a shade less dreadful to us than a hearse, drew up 
at our door, our hearts were of a Neronian hardness. 

" Were I Diogenes," says wrathful Charles Lamb 
in one of his letters, " I would not move out of a 
kiklerkin into a hogshead, though the first had noth- 
ing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret." 
I fancy this loathing of the transjtionary state came 
in great part from- the rude and elemental nature of 



FLITTING. 245 

the means of moving in Lamb's clay. In our own 
time, in Charlesbriclge at least, everything is so per- 
fectly contrived, that it is in some ways a pleasant 
excitement to move ; though I do not commend the 
diversion to any but people of entire leisure, for it 
cannot be denied that it is, at any rate, an interrup- 
tion to work. But little is broken, little is defaced, 
nothing is heedlessly outraged or put to shame. Of 
course there are in every house certain objects of 
comfort and even ornament which in a state of repose 
derive a sort of dignity from being cracked, or 
scratched, or organically debilitated, and give an 
idea of ancestral possession and of long descent to 
the actual owner ; and you must not hope that this 
venerable quality will survive their public exposure 
upon the furni' are wagon. There it instantly per- 
ishes, like the consequence of some country notable 
huddled and hustled about in the graceless and igno- 
rant tumult of a great city. To tell the truth, the 
number of things that turn shabby under the ordeal 
of moving strikes a pang of unaccustomed poverty 
to the heart which, loving all manner of makeshifts, 
is rich even in its dilapidations. For the time you 
feel degraded by the spectacle of that forlornness, 
and if you are a man of spirit, you try to sneak out 
of association with it in the mind of the passer-by ; 
you keep scrupulously in-doors, or if a fancied exi- 
gency obliges you to go back and forth between the 
old house and the new, you seek obscure by-ways 
remote from the great street down which the wairon 
flaunts your ruin and decay, and time your arrivals 



246 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

and departures so as to have the air of merely drop- 
ping in at either place. This consoles you ; but it 
deceives no one ; for the man who is moving is un- 
mistakably stamped with transition. 

Yet the momentary eclipse of these things is not 
the worst. It is momentary ; for if you will but 
plant them in kindly corners and favorable exposures 
of the new house, a mould of respectability will 
gradually overspread them again, and they will once 
more account for their presence by the air of having 
been a long time in the family ; but there is danger 
that in the first moments of mortification you will be 
tempted to replace them with new and costly articles. 
Even the best of the old things are nothino; to boast 
of in the hard, unpitying light to which they are 
exposed, and a difficult and indocile spirit of extrav- 
agance is evoked in the least profuse. Because of 
this fact alone I should not commend the diversion 
of moving save to people of very ample means as 
well as perfect leisure ; there are more reasons than 
the misery of flitting why the dweller in the kilder- 
kin should not covet the hoo-shead reeking of claret. 

But the grosser misery of moying is, as I have 
hinted, vastly mitigated by modern science, and what 
remains of it one may use himself to with no tre- 
mendous effort. I have found that in the dentist's 
chair, — that ironically luxurious seat, cushioned in 
satirical suggestion of impossible repose, — after a 
certain initial period of clawing, filing, scraping, and 
punching, one's nerves accommodate themselves to 
the torment, and one takes almost an objective in- 



FLITTING. 247 

terest in the operation of tooth-filling ; and in like 
manner after two or three wagon-loads of your house- 
hold stuff have passed down the public street, and 
all your morbid associations with them have been 
desecrated, you begin almost to like it. Yet I can- 
not regard this abandon as a perfectly healthy emo- 
tion, and I do not counsel my reader to mount himself 
upon the Avngon and ride to and fro even once, for 
afterwards the remembrance of such an excess will 
grieve him. 

Of course, I meant to imply by this that moving 
sometimes comes to an end, though it is not easy to 
believe so while moving. The time really arrives 
when you sit down in your new house, and amid 
whatever disorder take your first meal there. This 
meal is pretty sure to be that gloomy tea, that loathly 
repast of butter and toast, and some kind of cake, 
with which the soul of the early-dining American is 
daily cast down between the hours of six and seven 
in the evening; and instinctively you compare it with 
the last meal you took in your old house, seeking in 
vain to decide whether this is more dispiriting than 
that. At any rate that was not at all the meal which 
the last meal in any house which has been a home 
ought to be in fact, and is in books. It was hurriedly 
cooked ; it was served upon fugitive and irregular 
crockery ; and it was eaten in deplorable disorder, 
with the professional movers waiting for the table 
outside the dining-room. It ought to have been an 
act of serious devotion ; it was nothing but an ex- 
piation. It should have been a solemn commemo- 



248 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

ration of all past dinners in the place, an invocation 
to their pleasant apparitions. But I, for my part, 
could not recall these at all, though now I think of 
them with the requisite pathos, and I know they 
were perfectly worthy of remembrance. I salute 
mournfully the companies that have sat down at 
dinner there, for they are sadly scattered now ; some 
beyond seas, some beyond the narrow gulf, so impass- 
ably deeper to our longing and tenderness than the 
seas. But more sadly still I hail the host himself, 
and desire to know of him if literature was not 
somehow a gayer science in those days, and if his 
peculiar kind of drolling had not rather more heart 
in it then. In an odd, not quite expressible fashion, 
something of him seems dispersed abroad and per- 
ished in the guests he loved. I trust, of course, 
that all will be restored to him when he turns — as 
•every man past thirty feels he may when he likes, 
.and has the time — and resumes his youth. Or if 
this feeling is only a part of the great tacit promise 
of eternity, I am all the more certain of his getting 
back his losses. 

I say that now these apposite reflections occur to 
me with a sufficient ease, but that upon the true 
occasion for them they w^ere absent. So, too, at 
the first meal in the new house, there was none of 
that desirable sense of setting up a family altar, but 
a calamitous impression of irretrievable vipheaval, 
in honor of which sackcloth and ashes seemed the 
only wear. Yet even the next day the Lares and 
Penates had regained something of their wonted 



FLITTING. 249 

cheerfulness, and life had begun again with the first 
breakfast. In fact, I found myself already so firmly 
established that, meeting the furniture cart which 
had moved me the day before, I had the face to ask 
the driver whom they were turning out of house and 
home, as if my own flitting were a memory of the 
far-off past. 

Not that I think the professional mover expects to 
be addressed in a joking mood. I have a fancy that 
he cultivates a serious spirit himself, in which he 
finds it easy to sympathize with any melancholy on 
the part of the moving family. There is a slight 
flavor of undertakino- in his manner, which is 
nevertheless full of a subdued firmness very consol- 
ing and supporting ; though the life that he leads 
must be a troubled and uncheerful one, tiying 
alike to the muscles and the nerves. How often 
must he have been charged by anxious and fluttered 
ladies to be very careful of that basket of china, and 
those vases ! How often must he have been vexed 
by the ignorant terrors of gentlemen asking if he 
thinks that the library-table, poised upon the top of 
his load, will hold! His planning is not infallible, and 
when he breaks something uncommonly precious, 
what does a man of his sensibility do ? Is the 
demolition of old homes really distressing to him, or 
is he inwardly buoyed up by hopes of other and bet- 
ter homes for the people he moves ? Can there be 
any ideal of moving? Does he, perhaps, feel a pride 
in an artfully constructed load, and has he something 
like an artist's pang in unloading it? Is there a 



250 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

choice in families to be moved, and are some worse 
or better than others ? Next to the lawyer and the 
doctor, it appears to me that the professional mover 
holds the most confidential relations towards his fel- 
low-men. He is let into all manner of little domestic 
secrets and subterfuges ; I dare say he knows where 
half the people in town keep their skeleton, and 
what manner of skeleton it is. As for me, when 1 
saw him making towards a certain closet door, I 
planted myself firmly against it. He smiled intelli- 
gence ; he knew the skeleton was there, and that it 
would be carried to the new house after dark. 

I began by saying that I should wish my friend to 
have some sort of local attachment ; but I suppose 
it must be owned that this sentiment, like pity, and 
the modern love-passion, is a tiling so largely pro- 
duced by cultui'e that nature seems to have little or 
nothing to do with it. The first men were homeless 
wanderers ; the patriarchs dwelt in tents, and shifted 
their place to follow the pasturage, without a sigh ; 
and for children — the pre-historic, the antique peo- 
ple, of our day — moving is a rapture. The last 
dinner in the old house, the first tea in the new, so 
doleful to their elders, are partaken of by them with 
joyous riot. Their shrill trebles echo gleefully from 
the naked walls and floors ; they race up and down 
the carpetless stairs; they menace the dislocated 
mirrors and crockery ; through all the chambers of 
desolation they frolic with a gayety indomitable 
«ave by bodily exhaustion. If the reader is of a 
moving family, — and so he is as he is an Ameri- 



FLITTING. 251 

can, — lie can recall the zest he found during child- 
hood in the moving which had for his elders — 
poor victims of a factitious and conventional senti- 
ment ! — only the salt and bitterness of tears. His 
•spirits never fell till the carpets were down ; no sor- 
row touched him till order returned ; if Heaven so 
blessed him that his bed was made upon the floor for 
one night, the angels visited his dreams. Whj, 
then, is the mature soul, however sincere and hum- 
ble, not onlj grieved but mortified by flitting? 
Why cannot one move without feeling the great 
public eye fixed in pitying contempt upon him ? This 
sense of abasement seems to be something quite 
inseparable from the act, which is often laudable, 
and in every way wise and desirable ; and he whom 
it has afflicted is the first to turn, after his own estab- 
lishment, and look with scornful compassion upon 
the overflowing furniture wagon as it passes. But 
I imagine that Abraham's neio-libors, when he stnick 
his tent, and packed his parlor and kitchen furniture 
upon his camels, and started off" with Mrs. Sarah 
to seek a new camping-ground, did not smile at the 
procession, or find it worthy of ridicule or lament. 
Nor did Abraham, once settled, and reposing in the 
cool of the evening at the door of his tent, gaze 
sarcastically upon the moving of any of his brother 
patriarchs. 

To some such philosophical serenity we shall also 
return, I suppose, when we have wisely theorized 
life in our climate, and shall all have become nomads 
once more, following June and October up and down 



252 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

and across the continent, and not suffering the full 
malice of the winter and summer anywhere. But 
as yet, the derision that attaches to moving attends 
even the goer-out of town, and the man of many 
trunks and a retinue of linen-suited womankind is a 
pitiable and despicable object to all the other passen- 
gers at the railroad station and on the steamboat 
wharf. 

This is but one of many ways in which mere 
tradition oppresses us. I protest that as moving 
is now managed in Charlesbridge, there is hardly 
any reason Avhy the master or mistress of the house- 
hold should put hand to anything ; but it is a tradi- 
tion that they shall dress themselves in their worst, 
as for heavy work, and shall go about very shabby 
for at least a day before and a day after the transi- 
tion. It is a kind of sacrifice, I suppose, to a ven- 
erable ideal ; and I would never be the first to omit 
it. In others I observe that this vacant and cere- 
monious zeal is in proportion to an incapacity to do 
anything that happens really to be required ; and I 
believe that the truly sage person would devote 
moving-day to paying visits of ceremony in his finest 
clothes. 

As to the house which one has left, I think it 
would be preferable to have it occupied as soon as 
possible after one's flitting. Pilgrimages to the 
dismantled shrine are certainly to be avoided by the 
friend of cheerfulness. A day's absence and empti- 
ness wholly change its character, though the famil- 
iarity continues, with a ghastly difference, as in the 




" Vacant ami tcreiiiuiiious zeal." See pai^e 252. 



FLITTING. 253 

beloved face that the life has left. It is not at all 
the vacant house it was when you came first to look 
at it : for then hopes peopled it, and now memories. 
In that golden prime you had long been boarding, 
and any place in which you could keep house seemed 
utterly desirable. How distinctly you recall that Avet 
day, or that fair day, on which you went through it 
and decided that this should be the guest chamber 
and that the family room, and what could be done 
with the little back attic in a pinch ! The children 
could play in the dining-room ; and to be sure the 
parlor was rather small if you wanted to have com- 
pany ; but then, who would ever want to give a 
party ? and besides, the pump in the kitchen was a 
compensation for anything. How lightly the dumb 
waiter ran up and down, — 

" Qual piuma al vento! " 

you sang, in very glad-heartedness. Then esti- 
mates of the nvimber of yards of carpeting ; and 
how you could easily save the cost from the differ- 
ence between boarding and house-keeping. Adieu, 
Mrs. Brown ! henceforth let your " desirable apart- 
ments, en suite or single, furnished or unfurnished, 
to gentlemen only! " — this married pair is about to 
escape forever from your extortions. 

Well, if the years passed without making us sad" 
der, should we be much the wiser for their goin^ ? 
Now you know, little couple, that there are extor- 
tions in this wicked world beside Mrs. Brown's ; and 
some other things. But if you go into the empty 



254 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. 

house that was lat<^ly your home, you will not, I be- 
lieve, be haunted by these sordid disappointments, 
for the place should evoke other regrets and medita- 
tions. Truly, though the great fear has not come 
upon you here, in this room you may have known 
moments when it seemed very near, and when the 
quick, fevered breathings of the little one timed 
your own heart-beats. To that door, with many 
other missives of joy and pain, came haply the dis- 
patch which hurried you off to face your greatest sor- 
row — came by night, like a voice of God, speaking 
and warning, and making all your work idle and 
your aims foolish. These walls have answered, how 
many times, to your laughter ; they have had friendly 
ears for the trouble that seemed to grow by utter- 
ance. You have sat upon the threshold so many 
summer days ; so many winter mornings you have 
seen the snows drifted high about it ; so often your 
step has been light and heavy upon it. There is 
the study, where your magnificent performances 
were planned, and your exceeding small performances 
were achieved ; hither you hurried with the first crit- 
icism of your first book, and read it with the rapture 
that nothing but a love-letter and a favorable review 
can awaken. Out there is the well-known humble 
prospect, that was commonly but a vista into dream- 
land ; on the other hand is the pretty grove, — its 
/eaves now a little painted with the autumn, and fal- 
tering to their fall. 

Yes, the place must always be sacred, but pain- 
fully sacred ; and I say again one should not go near 



FLITTING. 265 

it unless as a penance. If the reader will suffer me 
the confidence, I will own that there is always a pang 
in the past which is more than any pleasure it can 
give, and I believe that he, if he were perfectly hon- 
est, — as Heaven forbid I or any one should be, — 
would also confess as much. There is no house to 
which one would return, having left it, though it 
were the hogshead out of which one had moved into 
a kilderkin ; for those associations whose perishing 
leaves us free, and preserves to us what little youth 
we have, were otherwise perpetuated to our burden 
and bondage. Let some one else, who has also es- 
caped from his past, have your old house ; he will 
find it new and untroubled by memories, while you, 
under another roof, enjoy a present that borders only 
upon the future. 



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